CentOS prerelease security

The CentOS Linux distribution is in many respects the optimal choice for anyone that wants a stable system that is supported over a number of years. I run it on a handful of servers and the problems are few and far between.

However, one thing has been emerging as a bit of a problem lately, and that is that security updates from Red Hat has taken quite some time to get built and released for CentOS. This is especially true in the weeks following a new point release from Red Hat. Not having security updates available for known problems for weeks a the time makes users of CentOS less secure than they would otherwise be.

To help make this problem a bit less pronounced I have started to rebuild security updates from Red Hat and installing them on the systems I administer. That's one of the beauties of open source, you can fix things. If anyone else is interested in those updated packages they can be found at http://rpm.resare.com/centos5-pre-security. If you're in the target demographic you'll know what to do.

Filed under centos | Comment (0)