[CentOS] Is this right? -- Centos 6 and RHEL 6 infrastrure for continuous update/upgrade

[Eddie G. O'Connor Jr.]

On 02/10/2013 03:37 AM, James Hogarth wrote:
>> I would assume (and I know it's not good to do that!) that the updates
>> and patches that are pushed out through the repos are something not to
>> be ingored,....so why would the severity of one be that big an
>> issue?....(and I'm just curious...not trying to start a war!..LoL!)
>>
> For a start there's threes categories: bug fixes, enhancements and security
> fixes.
>
> The first will cover things like typos in man pages or behaviour that is
> not right but has no risk to the system.
>
> The second adds something new to a package - tzdata is a good example here.
>
> The third is security issues - these will generally fix one or more CVE
> announcements.
>
> Within that third category there are different levels of security issue
> depending on the nature of the problem.
>
> For example if something needs an interactive login as an unprivileged user
> to cause a process (eg mysqld) to fail that could be low security risk
> given the need to be on the system and only a denial of service to that one
> subsystem and no data loss.
>
> A higher category might be an unprivileged user being able to escalate
> their privileges to obtain increased access to a system they shouldn't have
> - there was a sudo exploit last year that would fall into this.
>
> The most severe category of security issue would allow am unprivileged user
> to remotely gain privileged access... This leads to full system compromises
> and should always be patched asap - especially on public facing systems.
>
> Sometimes it's possible to chain these things together... Fire example
> there might be a way for an unprivileged user to run arbitrary code (think
> a php big perhaps) which you could then chain to a local privilege
> escalation to take full control of a system.
>
> This is also why selinux is important to confine services to prevent them
> from going out of their allowed domain and mitigating security issues as
> and when they arise.
>
> As an admin rather than just updating everything all the time it's best
> practice to schedule updates and test them before major roll outs.
> Depending on the severity of the issue it may be something you delay to a
> standardised patching schedule (eg once a month update things) or treat as
> an emergency an roll out much quicker.
>
> Does that help explain things?
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Most DEFINITELY! I can see I'll be "picking your brains" as MUCH as 
possible....as I attempt to get an RHCSA certification!...LoL! I've been 
using Fedora 18 and CEntOS on two different machines now, and I would 
always see these "SEL Alerts"...not knowing what they were....I will be 
paying MUCH more attention to them from now on. Also I am going to check 
for updates more frequently, I currently have my machien just give me a 
notification when there's new updates available, but maybe scheduling it 
for the last / first of every month isn't such a bad idea, at least I'd 
be able to keep track of what's going on on those machines! As it stands 
now I can't tell you when last either one of them were updated!....well 
thnaks so much for the info Mr. Hogarth!....Have a good weekend!


EGO II