Learning Red Hat Linux, Second Edition

The Red Hat Network

Red Hat provides a service known as the Red Hat Network (http://www.redhat.com/products/network), designed to help you keep your Red Hat Linux system up-to-date and secure. If you purchased the official release of Red Hat Linux, you’re entitled to a 30-day subscription to the Red Hat Network for one system. You can purchase additional subscriptions for $19.95 per month, per system. Users of freely redistributed copies of Red Hat Linux, such as that included with this book, are not entitled to a free Red Hat Network subscription.

The Red Hat Network provides access to security alerts, bug fix alerts, and enhancement alerts published by Red Hat. Updated packages can be downloaded or automatically installed via the Red Hat Update Agent. The Red Hat Network would seem to be of significant benefit to administrators of multiple systems, who might otherwise have difficulty timely applying patches to close security loopholes and fix problems.

The Red Hat Network does have several limitations, at least as currently implemented. The version of Red Hat Update Agent shipped with Red Hat Linux 7.2 sometimes has difficulty updating the kernel; therefore, security and bug fixes that require installation of a new kernel sometimes cannot be performed automatically. The Agent can, however, download a package containing a new kernel, which can be manually installed by the system administrator.

Similarly, the Agent is not without its flaws. In one instance, the Agent automatically ...