[CentOS] Auto-installing security updates?

Tue May 19 21:54:15 UTC 2009
JohnS <jses27 at gmail.com>

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.

JohnStanley