Chapter 2. Consolidating Patches on a Red HatFedora Network

Chapter 2. Consolidating Patches on a Red Hat/Fedora Network

Patching Linux on one computer is a straightforward process. As you read in Chapter 1, "Patch Management Systems," many distributions include patch management utilities that can keep a single system up to date. Regular patch downloads for one or two computers over a typical high-speed connection are not a problem. Regular patch downloads from dozens of computers from a LAN over a shared Internet connection can be troublesome.

Therefore, you need to know how to configure a central patch management repository for a network. In this chapter, I outline how you can plan a repository by using Fedora Core Linux. In Chapter 7, "Setting Up a yum Repository," I provide the detailed instructions for setting up a repository for Fedora Core. Alternatively, if you're administering patch management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems, you can set up a Red Hat Proxy Server. I'll take you through the configuration process for a Red Hat Network proxy and client, step by step.

Finally, I'll describe the basic patch management process for some of the rebuilds of RHEL, specifically CentOS and Lineox. Because they use the yum and apt tools, you can keep them up to date using the repository tools you'll learn about later in this book.

Note

In this chapter, we'll be referring to proxy servers (lowercase) which cache and may sometimes regulate your LAN's communication with outside networks, such as the Internet. We'll also be referring to a Red Hat Network Proxy Server (uppercase), which can be configured as your LAN's repository for RHEL updates.