[CentOS] Auto-installing security updates?

[Lanny Marcus]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 4:54 PM, JohnS <jses27 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 14:37 -0500, Lanny Marcus wrote:
>> On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 11:22 AM, JohnS <jses27 at 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.
> ---
> I do not disagree with that. But we have a problem you see! That problem
> is an ordinary user has of no use in reading that manual. I in fact have
> tried that with my father in law. All he was interested in was email web
> browsing and saving his pictures. Especially if he/she is new to Linux
> or computers.

Possibly the best way is for the updates to be setup to run
automatically and in the rare (but possible) event that something goes
awry, then the user call for on site help, to straighten it out. The
majority of the updates work properly, without any intervention, but
once in awhile....