Customer Reviews

Linux® Patch Management: Keeping Linux® Systems Up To Date

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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.

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.

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.

As linux continues to grow, various dialects of it have emerged. Notably Red Hat and Fedora. But also SUSE, Debian and others. This has also led to patches tending to be for specific distributions. Plus, different distributions might (and often do) emphasise different patch programs.

Thus, part of the reason for this book's length is the fragmentation of the linux community. Hence, one chapter focuses on patches for Red Hat and Fedora. (These distros have split only recently, and are still very close.) While another chapter concentrates on SUSE's patching method.

Jang also offers another patching idea that can be very fruitful to you, if you manage several (many?) linux machines. It is very inefficient in terms of bandwidth for you to update each machine directly from an external source. Where this assumes that the machines can be divided into sets, with each set being machines all at the same operating system version. Hence it is better for you to run a local patch depot. The depot downloads from outside your network, and your machines then update from the depot. There are several ways to do this, and Jang goes through these.

As an aside: He uses the term "repository". This is standard terminology. But the word is a poor choice. "Depot" has the same meaning and is shorter and easier to say. Brevity is a virtue. Personally, I think repository was chosen because the industry wanted a high-falutin' term.

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.

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.