Learning Red Hat Enterprise Linux & Fedora, Fourth Edition

Keeping Your Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Up to Date

Red Hat provides a service known as Red Hat Network (http://rhn.redhat.com), designed to help you keep your Red Hat Enterprise Linux system up-to-date and secure. Access to Red Hat Network is included with your subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If you purchase Red Hat Professional Workstation, you receive a one-year subscription to Red Hat Network. If you’re using Fedora Core, you can keep your system up to date by using Yum, which is described in Section 8.11.

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 is of significant benefit to administrators of multiple systems, who might otherwise have difficulty applying patches to close security loopholes and fix problems quickly.

Using Red Hat Network

To use Red Hat Network, your computer must be able to access the Internet. To set up your computer, you must perform two steps:

1. Sign up for Red Hat Network.

2. Create a system profile for your computer.

Once your computer is set up to use Red Hat Network, updates can be accomplished automatically based on a schedule or manually, by using the Red Hat Update Agent.

The following sections describe these procedures as they existed at the time of writing. However, Red Hat may revise the operation of Red Hat Network at any time. For more information on using ...