Security Updates Not Properly Flagged

Home » CentOS » Security Updates Not Properly Flagged
CentOS 7 Comments

Hi,

I assumed that it’s possible to install security updates with “yum –security update”. On the CentOS-announce mailinglist and I have received several security updates recently. Most are not relevant for us but glib2 and kernel are two we would like to address without updating the whole system.

Unfortunately both glib2 and kernel updates are filtered while running yum –security update

This is the output:
–> glib2-2.56.1-9.el7_9.x86_64 from updates removed (updateinfo)
–> kernel-3.10.0-1160.31.1.el7.x86_64 from updates removed (updateinfo)

There are probably more security updates which should be installed by yum –security but those are the packages I am most interested in.

Please change as necessary to allow yum –security to work.

Many thanks.

Best Regards, Thomas

7 thoughts on - Security Updates Not Properly Flagged

  • CentOS does not provide the metadata to allow the –security flag to work.

    It doesn’t provide it because that information from Redhat is proprietary and not open source.

    P.

  • Il 2021-06-21 13:34 Pete Biggs ha scritto:

    Right.

    This is not my understanding. From what I can see, updates which patches CVEs are freely readable on Red Has site. For example:
    CVE: https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2021-3156
    UPDATE: https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2021:0221

    Historically the CentOS team refused to provide such metadata due to the added work required. Now with Stream, and the demise of classic CentOS, security updates are even less probable (ie: a rolling release is often wholly updated).

    Regards.

  • Sorry, I forgot to mention that I am using CentOS 7. This should receive the Red Hat Update cycle releases until 2024, right?

    Regards, Thomas

  • Hi,

    freely does not imply free to redistribute. Of course these informations are available from various sources which allow redistribution, but it takes time to aggregate them – time that someone need to spend doing the necessary research.

    best regards, Markus

  • Yes, but if you only want to install security related updates, you have to select the packages on your own because CentOS doesn’t provide such metadata.

    Regards, Simon

  • CentOS Stream is not a rolling release.  It gets “rolling updates,” but that just means that there are no point releases within a major release, and that updates aren’t delayed in order to group rebased packages together at 6 month intervals.

  • Il 2021-06-22 02:34 Gordon Messmer ha scritto:

    Hi Gordon, yeah, I used the term “rolling release” in a too-broad sense – I was really referring to “rolling updates”, sorry for the confusion.

    Still I think my point applies: if metadata for security updates were not provided before, it now seems even less probable than the CentOS
    team will provide such information, as the maintainers are facing a continuous stream of updates.

    But hey – happy to be proven wrong!
    Regards.

    —
    Danti Gionatan Supporto Tecnico Assyoma S.r.l. – http://www.assyoma.it email: g.danti@assyoma.it – info@assyoma.it GPG public key ID: FF5F32A8