We are currently redhat 5.6. Ug nothing like SMPE for the mainframe. I guess this is all going to depend on what applications we run and how many servers we eventually use.
Anybody else? What's your process for maintenance? -----Original Message----- From: Patrick Spinler [mailto:spinler.patr...@mayo.edu] Sent: Friday, August 19, 2011 11:40 AM To: Linux on 390 Port Cc: Dazzo, Matt Subject: Re: patching frequency On 08/19/2011 07:51 AM, Dazzo, Matt wrote: > On the topic of patching, we have our first test Linux server up and running. > Being new to Linux, what tool and process is used by most to maintain the > servers? Reading the RH Cookbook 5.2 chapter 11 talks about using RPM and > yum. Is this where I get started? > That's unfortunately a fairly lengthy discussion. It really all depends. Some of the variables are: *) what distro you're running *) what vendor/distro supplied and what local repositories you have (or can create) to patch from *) do you want to run patches locally from each server, or push them from a central service *) what your patching constraints, requirements, and goals are etc, etc, etc. For example, for a redhat system, if you have redhat network access, you can point your linux server straight at rhn.redhat.com, and do a yum upgrade. However, what you get from that is whatever patches are available at that moment in time. Next week might have newer patches, which may make a difference if you e.g. do a dev server one week, and it's production counterpart a week later -- can you tolerate dev potentially being different than prod? You could paper over that by setting up a process to pull software from rhn.redhat.com and setting up a local yum repo, with fixed, known packages to patch from, but that's a pile of work. You could also set up spacewalk and/or purchase satellite to help automate that process and slap a pretty gui on top of it (and do provisioning as well), but again their's cost and time tradeoffs. All this changes, of course, if you're running SLES or Centos or Debian or the like, to whatever their distro specific patching infrastructure is. Seriously, this is worthy of a presentation or two at a conference. I'd volunteer for it, but our travel budget is more or less non-existent. :-( Maybe a whitepaper from some helpful vendor? (hint hint) -- Pat ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
