[CentOS] Kernel Upgrade and RAID Card

Sun Jul 13 22:22:00 UTC 2008
nate <centos at linuxpowered.net>

Ryan Nichols wrote:

> and if i go back to grub take the old kernel its happy..
> werid..

Sounds like you should just stick to the old kernel, what's in
the new kernel that you need anyways? Is the system in a secure
place?(e.g. separate firewall protecting it, not directly on
the internet, don't have untrusted users logging in).

If so, then you really have little to worry about, there is not
much interesting things released in the newer minor version releases
of the kernel in RHEL/CentOS. It's that way on purpose.

In my experience having all your systems completely up to date is
rare. The environment I stepped into a few months ago for example
is running RHEL 4 Update 1 for the most part. They still run windows
2000 on several systems, and I don't think they've patched them
recently. But the nature of the environment and the users that
interact on it don't keep me up at night like a system directly
connected to the internet with untrusted users. It'll probably
take me the next 6 months to get everything more up to date in
this particular environment, it has a lot of interdependencies.
And by that point it should be easier to manage going forward,
but we'll still probably won't install updates sooner than
a month or two after they come out in general because that stuff
takes time to test and deploy.

Hopefully your not in a situation where you have untrusted users,
if so you should replace the hardware with something that is
better supported, or abstract the exposure to the system with
something like virtualization, certainly not perfect but it's
better then nothing, it will help dramatically against the
most common, casual attacks.

nate