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1. Linux Patch Management

Keeping Linux Systems Up to Date

1.1 3/5 Recommended

Michael Jang
2006, Pearson Education, ISBN 0-13-236675-4
$44.99 USD

1.2  Overview

This book is all about keeping your Linux systems up to date. It does not cover your update policies nearly so much as it describes the mechanisms for updating your Linux system. It covers elements of Red Hat, SUSE and Debian update styles.

1.3  Red Hat, SUSE and Debian

The author identifies that the primary update mechanisms are associated with Red Hat and SUSE (both rpm based) and Debian.

With regards to Red Hat, the focus is primarily on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product line. The book covers how to entitle your RHEL product (requires a support entitlement $$$$) and the benefits of the Red Hat Network. It covers how to use the uptodate command to keep your RHEL product updated.

Outside of RHEL, the book talks about the ways to use update Fedora, the community project which help test packages that may or may not show up in future versions of RHEL. Fedora updates primarily use yum, and this book does a reasonable job of covering that as well.

SUSE likewise is covered both with the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) line and the SUSE Professional line. The SLES product line requires an id and password associated with an active annually renewable support contract. In both the case of SLES and SUSE Professional, the common mechansim for updates is YaST (SUSE's administration tool).

Several Debian package management utilities are discussed, including Aptitude and Synaptic. The primary update engine for Debian based distributions is apt. While Debian is discussed, the majority of the book focuses on Red Hat and SUSE (which makes sense... 2 against 1).

1.4  Updating Locally

The book points out how cumbersome it is to update many computers using the internet. So the book covers setting up a Red Hat Proxy Server for RHEL and setting up a YaST Online Update Server for SLES. This is probably the biggest benefit of the book. Most people know the normal update mechanism used for their distribution. However, knowing how to setup a local repository for patching might have been too mysterious..... until now. This book covers the mechanisms for setting up a local patch repository.

1.5  Conclusion

This book is brief and to the point. If it has a weakness, it's that it convers a plethora of distributions and their variations. It is likely that you'll only be interested in the material covering your chosen distribution for deployment. So, what is already a relatively small book, essentially becomes much smaller.

With that said, if you do use multiple version of Linux, this book will help you understand the differences between the distributions with regards to patch management.

I recommend this book for the somewhat new Linux administrator wanting to better manage updates and patches to their systems. Back to Review View Today