Tag Archives: redhat

Predicting a Red Hat/CentOS Point Release Upgrade

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Upgrading a Red Hat or CentOS system isn’t difficult. Just type yum update, it’s easy. So easy, in fact, that is quite possible to upgrade a system you didn’t intend to, or to upgrade a system further than was wanted, which is the subject of this post.

Point Upgrades

Yum update, used on a system which has not been updated for months or years, will cause hundreds of packages to be upgraded. It will also result in a point release upgrade. For example, a system running Red Hat/CentOS 6.2 might change to 6.5 after the update, or even to 6.7 or 6.9. Continue reading →

Patching for Dirty Cow on Debian, Red Hat, Ubuntu, CentOS

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“Dirty Cow” is the common name given to Linux vulnerability CVE-2016-5195. It is a “privilege escalation” that allows a non-root user to gain root access on a system. An attacker must have system access first, as a normal user. Then they use the bug to obtain root rights. It is dangerous and should be patched.

The Linux kernel itself was fixed in October 2016. Since then, Linux vendors have all released patches. Many Internet articles suggest addressing the bug by doing a general system update. While that might be fine for a test machine or Linux desktop, it isn’t ideal for a production server. This article describes how to fix the bug in the least invasive way possible – by updating the kernel only. Continue reading →