I have never worked with RH Linux or any other linux for that mater. I am wondering what updates, patches, and enhancements do you people recommend doing at a bare mininum

http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh71-errata.html
http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh71-...a-security.html
http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh71-...a-bugfixes.html
http://www.redhat.com/support/errata/rh71-...ta-updates.html

Also can someone please explain how to setup RH Network. I understand that Red Hat Network is an Internet solution for managing a Red Hat Linux system or a network of Red Hat Linux systems. All Security Alerts, Bug Fix Alerts, and Enhancement Alerts (collective known as Errata Alerts) can be downloaded directly from Red Hat. You can even have updates automatically delivered directly to your system as soon as they are released, but are these then installed for you or is that something we take care off

To set up RH Network, just run rhn_register from your server (it's in /usr/sbin)...You'll be presented with all the appropriate screens to sign up. You can then use up2date from your server to get updates.

When you log in to your RHN account at http://rhn.redhat.com/ you'll see two Automation Options for your server with a checkbox beside each:
- Auto Delivery of Packages
- Auto Upgrade of Packages
So presumably, the software can take care of all the upgrades.

However, I would be wary of the automatic upgrades because of the presence of Plesk on the server. For example, sendmail is one of the updates currently available through RHN... But Plesk uses qmail instead of sendmail, and has even replaced /usr/sbin/sendmail with a link to /usr/local/psa/qmail/bin/sendmail. So installing the sendmail update from RHN will likely mess up qmail at least a little. There are probably other similar cases of conflicts between RHN and the Plesk installation.

Personally, I'm planning to install the updates manually after reviewing them individually.

After looking at all those updates I see that some probably dont do much for RH as a server OS but rather are geared for the Desktop OS. That said, with my little knowledge of RH I cant distinguish between that at this point.

That is why hopefully someone with server administration experience will list all those that these servers should get at a bare mininum

Now even thinking, since RH knows that its OS is used alot as a server OS it would be great if they seperate the updates into two catagories

Desltop OS
Server OS

Actually, it shouldn't even try to install the sendmail update. Your system knows what RedHat packages it has installed, and it won't show Sendmail because...well, sendmail wasn't installed from an RPM. It probably won't even show qmail either.

I run exim (and have /usr/bin/sendmail linked to exim) and it didn't install the sendmail update on my system. However, it knows I have exim installed from an RPM, and if an update for exim shows up, it'll update that instead.

The output of "up2date -l" lists sendmail and sendmail-cf (but not qmail) on my server. I don't know whether that means it would be included in the automatic upgrade....

I'm thinking of following this procedure:

Stop PSA.
Backup the plesk reccommended directories.
Upgrade ALL installed redhat packages with security updates.
Reinstall PLESK.
Re-patch PLESK.
Restore the backup.
Restart PSA.

Anyone tried anything like this?

I'm also considering ignoring all security updates except for those which are kernel related or affect basic utilities, since the PLESK system doesn't use ANY orginal RedHat parts, and users don't have shell accounts.

And thoughts?