Software Patching

Upgrading External Packages with unattended-upgrade

The unattended-upgrade tool is a great way to keep your system automatically updated. Learn how it works and how configure it.

Summary

The unattended-upgrade tool is a great way to keep your system automatically updated. While you might not always want to do that for all packages, it definitely can be a great way to assist in your security efforts. In that case, tell it to track security updates and install the related packages. If you are using third-party packages (e.g. via PPAs), the system has no idea about security updates for those packages.

Automatic Security Updates with DNF

The dnf package manager and dnf-automatic tool can be used for automated security patching on Linux systems. It requires only a few steps to set it up.

Summary

The Dandified YUM tool, DNF, has become a powerful package manager for systems running Fedora. As it looks now, it will become also the default package manager for CentOS 8 and RHEL 8. One of the benefits from dnf is the option to retrieve security information very easily. This allows us to use it for automatic security patching of our Linux systems. Let’s explore the options and see how dnf-automatic can help us with fully automated patching.

Showing Available Security Updates with DNF

Systems running Fedora have the DNF utility. With DNF it becomes easily to install packages and stay up-to-date with security related updates.

Summary

Checking Security Updates for your Software Packages DNF is the default package manager since Fedora 22. As it is considered to be a better version of YUM, some of our Lynis users asked for DNF support. With focus on auditing and security patching, we definitely wanted to see that for ourselves. While building support, I’ve gathered the most important commands. In this blog post we will have a look how we can leverage the DNF output to show only the available security updates.

Determine Processes Which Need a Restart with checkrestart/needrestart

Just patching software packages is not enough. We cover some tools to determine which processes need a restart to complete software patch management.

Summary

Proper software patch management helps reducing weaknesses on your systems. But even if you patched an outdated system, old processes and libraries can continue to run in memory. For example when a library is updated, an active program might still use the old version. To really finish the process of software patching, we have to do more. This includes preparation, performing the update and finally check if we need a restart of software components.

Using unattended-upgrades on Debian and Ubuntu

To counter the biggest threat to software packages, Debian and Ubuntu based systems can use unattended-upgrades, to install security patches automatically.

Summary

To counter the biggest threat to software packages, they should be updated on a regular basis. Vulnerabilities are discovered on a daily basis, which also requires we monitor daily. Software patching takes time, especially when testing and reboots are needed. Fortunately, systems running Debian and Ubuntu can use unattended-upgrades to achieve automated patch management for security updates. Installation With most software packages, unattended-upgrades has to be installed. apt install unattended-upgrades