Deploying security updates

While it may seem like common sense to those of you more seasoned in security, updates for your distribution are released for a reason. In some cases, updates serve only to add new features or update software to the latest version. But in the case of Enterprise distributions such as CentOS and Debian, these are even more important.

This is one of the ways consumer-based distributions and Enterprise distributions differ. Distributions such as Ubuntu's non-LTS releases, Linux Mint, and Fedora receive more bleeding-edge packages than Enterprise distributions such as CentOS, Debian, and Red Hat. This is because the end user typically wants the latest versions of their web browser, e-mail client, word processor, or games. This doesn't matter much when it comes to the Enterprise. In the Enterprise, security updates are critical. While consumer-oriented distributions surely keep up to date with security patches on almost an equal level in most cases, these are intermixed...