Patching Linux - Pain or Gain?

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Patching a single Linux machine every once in a while can be a small pain, but what do you do when you have a data center full of machines that need updates?

How to Patch Your Linux Installation

Like all OSes, every once in a while you need to update the software running on your Linux server. You can do this in one of three ways :

  • Download the updated packages and manually install them yourself.
  • Use a built-in open source application that comes with the OS distribution.
  • Use a third party application that downloads the file and then runs the installation for you.

Let’s look at these in more detail.

Manual Updates

One way you can update your RedHat or SuSE machine is by going to your particular vendor’s Web or FTP site, and downloading the packages directly from the online file repository or a trusted mirror site. For recent products, like Novell’s SLES or RedHat Enterprise Servers, once you get the file onto your machine you can then run the RedHat Package Manager (aka “rpm”) and update the target program you choose.

linux rpm redhat

linux rpm redhat

After downloading the rrdtool’s latest RPM, you can run “rpm –i" to install the new package, or “rpm –u” if you are updating rrdtool. The next RPM command queries all the installed RPMs, and extracts only the information you want, using the grep command. The third command uninstalls the rrdtool using “rpm –e”. Finally, the last line confirms that the application rrdtool is not installed anymore.

If you have a location of a package available via a URL, you can point RPM to update it for you. This image shows the update, the confirmation, and the removal of the livna-release-6-1 package.

In a perfect world, once you run the rpm command, you’re done in a moment or two. Confirmation may be a short message provided by the package installation, or you just get a command prompt ready for your next Linux command. However, since we don’t live in a perfect world, things can get a little confusing. You may run into a dependency issue where another package on your machine has to be updated before you can update your target program.

linux rpm

linux rpm

A failed RPM installation will generate the above message and not continue the install.

Things can get worse when you realize that these packages that need updates also require further updates themselves, turning a simple upgrade into a longer exercise of having to figure out how to deal with all these dependencies and sub-dependencies.

Julio Urquidi
20 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Darkk
    Very nice article. Patching is just a way of life of sys admins everywhere regardless of what flavor of server and desktop OS. Least the article explains in detail what to expect and the gotchas.

    Good job!

    Darkk
    Reply
  • Patching harder on Linux than Windows?!?
    Maybe I'm biased, but updating Debian or ArchLinux (more of a desktop distro) has been so easy as not to even think about it.
    Reply
  • You really don't know what you're talking about here..and readers should avoid this article.

    If you buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux with a Satellite subscription Red Hat does the patching.

    If you have Novell - ZenWorks will do the trick.

    If you're running a non-commercial unsupported version than sure some of the options you mention might make sense but a simple cron job with yum/apt will do it all with one command line.

    Reply
  • Was this article written by Steve Ballmer? And interestingly there is only a single line about the Debian-based distros? Why Mr. Anderson, why didn't you mention the details about APT? Now Steve Ballmer, let me tell you something - my close friend is a sysadmin of my university (University Of Toronto) and he doesnt even bother patching the systems because they are fully automated (over 200 machines). As well he deploys 50 machines with brand new OS installation with no more than 5 lines of commands.

    Sad Tom's.. sad.. you have been an amazing site once upon a time ...
    Reply
  • hmmm.
    I'm a Windows guy most of the time but I enjoy playing with Linux from time to time.
    Actually as a Linux starter(some time ago) I had no problem patching my Linux.
    It was very easy...
    I do not remember reading or doing something special before patching it at that first time.
    Reply
  • Correction, Patch Quest by Advent Net was cited as patching only RedHat which is incorrect. It also patches Debian. In my experience finding a patch solution for your particular OS has not be that terribly difficult. Finding one that has robust scheduling, push on demand, and can handle the multitude of necessary evil apps, such as Adobe Reader, Quicktime, Realplayer, Instant Messaging, etc... is the real challenge.
    Reply
  • GoK
    The author of this article needs to go back through their information, and edit this article. It is highly inaccurate! The fact that he gave Debian-based GNU/Linux flavors (ie., Ubuntu&Gentoo) less time in the article than his praise for Mircosofts upstream ability for patches, seems a bad sign for this article.

    Patching most GNU/Linux installs is a simple task, which is highly scalable, and that can be fully automated through the use of CRON scheduling, etc. NO EXTRA SOFTWARE should be required to update/maintain ANY enterprise level GNU/Linux server distro (also if you server has a GUI on it, its not running in an enterprise level configuration).

    I find the mention of Windows Server strange in the article, since it can't run services like Bind9 (DNS), it only makes up roughly 38% of the current market share of net servers, and since it can't run Bind9, it runs NONE of the internet backbone (DNS routing server).

    I am a huge fan of Tom's, but this article should never have been published.
    Reply
  • nochternus
    <rant>
    While there are many Linux solutions, everybody will find what works best for them. I myself have become a fan of distributions like ArchLinux. I use it on my 3 servers at work and on my desktop and server at home. the package manager, pacman, is by far the best I've ever used. While it may not categorize some things into software groups, it does have it broken down into core, extra and then everything else. It is also extremely easy to configure and create wrappers or optional interfaces that utilize pacman (just like some of the others mentioned. There is also a package called the "arch build system" that allows you to create your own packages from source with the simple modifications of a PKGBUILD file, making recompiling and rebuilding easy and efficient. My latest server was not fully supported by a vanilla or even a patched kernel so a few quick modifications to the PKGBUILD and the kernel config and one command later, the package was compiled from source and installed without me sweating, swearing or crying.

    I don't want this to come off as a "YAY ARCH - EVERYBODY SWITCH" comment so much as a "do a little more research, or even a community probe could get you better information" comment. The concept of the article wasn't bad just slightly "mis-informative". Especially seeing as how not everything that is open-source and is an OS is linux/unix. Most are linux-like or unix-like (as is the nature of progression.

    As a note for the naysayers, I've used Windows Server, Debian, Gentoo, RedHat, SuSE, ubuntu, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and many spin offs of some of those. All of them have their strengths and weaknesses (most notably the flaw of the Windows Server platform would be any machine that loads it - THAT is a biased opinion.)
    </rant>
    Reply
  • malici0usc0de
    With Ubuntu you can also set it up to silently install them in the background, it just prompts for a password then goes away. I don't know how long Ubuntu has had this but I have been using it as my only OS at home for about 2 years now and have never had a problem with patches. I use XP at work as almost everyone does and I notice it operates almost exactly the same way except it doesn't ask you for a password. So if it works for the less techie MS user base then I don't see why so many problems are occurring with this same basic system running under Linux. sudo apt-get install brain
    Reply
  • resistance
    The writer of this article has 0% knowledge of _present-day_ GNU/Linux or this article was sponsored by software monopolist.

    in Debian based distros like *ubuntu you can set automatically daily updates without _any_ user intervension and without installing additional software.

    Its a first time I see such badly written article on tomsharware.
    Reply