The Start-to-Finish Patch Management Guide for Every Linux® Environment

To keep your Linux systems secure, reliable, and productive, you must stay current with patches and updates. But, until now, it has been difficult to find usable, trustworthy guidance on managing patches in Linux production environments. Linux Patch Management fills that gap, offering Linux professionals start-to-finish solutions, strategies, and examples for every environment, from single computers to enterprise-class networks.

Michael Jang presents patching solutions for Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, Debian, and other distributions. He systematically covers both distribution-specific tools and widely used community tools, such as apt and yum. This book’s streamlined patch management techniques minimize impacts on users, networks, and administrators, and address applications as well as the underlying OS. Whatever your role in managing Linux systems, Linux Patch Management will reduce your costs, enhance the availability of your systems, and dramatically improve your personal efficiency.

• Consolidating patches on a Red Hat network, including cached updates, as well as patching systems based on RHEL rebuild distributions

• Working with SUSE’s update systems, including YaST Online Update and Zenworks Linux Management

• Making the most of apt commands and the GUI-based Synaptic Package Manager

• Configuring apt for RPM distributions such as Fedora and SUSE Linux

• Creating repositories that can manage gigabytes of patches on diverse Linux systems

• Updating networks of Linux computers without overloading WAN or Internet connections

• Configuring yum clients, including coverage of emerging GUI tools such as Yum Extender

Bruce Perens’ Open Source Series is a definitive series of Linux and open source books by the world’s leading Linux professionals. Bruce Perens is the primary author of The Open Source Definition, the formative document of the open source movement, and the former Debian GNU/Linux Project Leader.

Series Editor Bruce Perens is an open source evangelist, developer, and consultant whose software is a major component of most commercial embedded Linux offerings. He founded or cofounded Linux Standard Base, Open Source Initiative, and Software in the Public Interest. As Debian GNU/Linux Project Leader, he was instrumental in getting the system on two U.S. space shuttle flights.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 6 Ratings

Terrific resource! - 2006-04-17
Reviewer Rating:
Although I'm very proficient on the Linux distros that I use every day, I always seem to have a new Linux system enter the environment that I'm unfamiliar with and must maintain or visit a site that uses a distro that my only interaction with was to patch on my last visit (...now how did I do that again?). Trying to remember all of the patching idiosyncrasies of each distro used to be a daunting task until I found this book. Linux Patch Management has been a Godsend. It is one of just a handful of books that I keep on my desk because I always seem to need it.
And besides being an incredibly useful guide to patching rarely visited systems, it also helps outline various patching strategies for the enterprise. It gives detailed instructions on setting up local patch repositories and proxies to help you control your environment's systems as well as provide a substantial time and bandwidth savings.
From single unfamiliar systems to enterprise-wide system management, this book has something for everyone and is written with just the right amount of information. A must have.

I'm still a little unsure - 2006-01-25
Reviewer Rating:
My first reaction to this was negative. What the heck do you need a book on this subject for - aren't the man pages enough?

Then I waffled a little - maybe it is nice to have the 10,000 foot overview of all of this, mixed in with some useful advice.

I'm still not sure. If you are managing multiple systems or are a consultant who is apt to run into most anything, this could be very helpful. For the average Linux user, maybe not: in my experience such people either leave their systems alone (no updates at all) or are themselves expert and keep their systems perfectly current - the latter probably don't need this.

But I still have that nagging doubt. For my own machines in my own office, I vacillate horribly. I always do the updates after an initial install, but often I ignore them after that unless it's some very serious security issue that I can't ignore. I do this because I don't want to break my systems and often I just don't have time to stage and test things.. but on the other hand sometimes I get religious and keep on top of a box weekly.

So.. I remain unsure of this book's value to me, but I'll keep it around as insurance.

Patching solutions for Fedora, Debian and other distributions, covering all kinds of tools and applications - 2006-04-04
Reviewer Rating:
Michael Jang's Linus Patch Management: Keeping Linux Systems Up To Date provides Linux users with complete patches for all kinds of environments: a feature Linux administrators will find essential. Here are patching solutions for Fedora, Debian and other distributions, covering all kinds of tools and applications. Whether you're updating networks and configuring clients or working with apt commands, if you're a Linux administrator, you must have this patch reference on hand.

Great summary of all your options! - 2006-03-01
Reviewer Rating:
A major difference between the different linux distrubutions is their Patch Management (or application management) implementation. I have found that most books pick one (or two) distro's and move forward into their topic--this book covers all of the major patch management solutions.

This book covers the full spectrum from a single machine environment, to setting up an environment that manages multiple machines, in a well organized easy to read format.

I would of appreciated a direct pro/con comparison of the different solutions--but that would just start a flame war.

Only for begginner sysadmins ! - 2006-03-10
Reviewer Rating:
For a begginner-to-intermediate sysadmin this book is a valuable resource, but for the professional already administering hunderds or thousands of servers it is of no real use.

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