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Keeping CentOS secure

 

August 9 2011

One annoyance CentOS has is that, whenever Red Hat makes a new upstream release available, CentOS stops making security updates until they are current with upstream's new release; this process can sometimes take months.

For CentOS users who want to be current with security updates until CentOS updates their system upstream, it is possible to use Scientific Linux's repo to apply security updates.

To do this, add the appropriate sl-security.repo file to /etc/yum.repos.d, as well as all of the relevant GPG public keys to /etc/pki/rpm-gpg. I have a handy tarball with all of these files, as well as a GPG signature for said tarball which I have signed with MaraDNS' public GPG key.

While it is a simple matter of exploding this tarball in the root directory to enable Scientific Linux security updates on a CentOS 5 system (via cd / ; tar xvjf sl-security-etc.tar.bz2), please be aware that this update does add GPG signatures that are allowed to sign rpm files.

This is quite useful for CentOS 5 users who want to keep up to date with security without having to reinstall the OS, or for OpenVZ container users, since OpenVZ provides a template for CentOS 5, but not one for Scientific Linux 5.

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