[CentOS] Question about updates

[Jonathan Billings]

On Feb 16, 2019, at 15:14, Tate Belden <wyoham at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> One can also do the 'yum-cron' dance to automate updates.
> Good writeup and description here:
> 
> https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/how-to-setup-automatic-security-updates-on-centos-7/

1.) yum-cron with “update_cmd = security” wont do anything for CentOS because it doesn’t have security metadata in its repos. EPEL will get updates. The person who wrote this must be using RHEL or some clone that publishes security metadata. Looking at google for this topic shows a lot of people get this wrong, which means there are probably a lot of insecure systems out there. 

2.) pet peeve: use “grep searchterm filename” and not “cat filename | grep searchterm”.

3.) you don’t need to restart the yum-cron.service systemctl unit after modifying yum.conf, since it’s not a running service, it just touches a file that tells the cron job that it is activated. 



—
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>