On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 11:22 AM, JohnS jses27@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 16:11 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
I've been asked to think about setting up an installation for a recently- widowed man. His needs are small - mail, Internet, on-line banking, basically
- but his wife dealt with all of it on her laptop and he feels very insecure.
It seems to me that CentOS would be perfect for him except for the need to keep it securely patched. I'm wondering if it's possible to auto-install security updates - for that matter, with so small a set of applications perhaps auto-installing every update would be good enough.
Maybe this could be done with a script run under cron.daily, so that anacron picks it up?
I'd be glad of any advice.
Anne
That's just the thing you don't have to do anything. Yumupdatesd will handle that for you. Or stop the service and put on a cronjob. Just that easy.
The NSA manual suggests disabling yum-updatesd and doing it with a cron job. update yum and then update.
However, on very rare occasions, he might get bitten in the rear. As someone else suggested, possibly you could drop in and update his system, once a month or so, in case something goes awry? The risk to that is that he would not have the latest and greatest versions, after they are updated for security/stability. The plus side is that he might get very confused if something goes awry with an automatic update. I would think that if he uses a Desktop, CentOS will be very good for him. Consider adding the Multimedia stuff for him? From what I've read on the list, CentOS on a Laptop can be problematic, but if he's using a Desktop, should be good to go. GL