Neill Newman wrote:
Aparently SuSE has something similar to up2date, but I don't know too much about it, any SuSE fans care to comment on th autoupdate features of Yast ??
Well, it seems to work well enough! Alan has used it, I've just watched him really, but he ticks the boxes for the kinds of things he wants and off it goes and does its thing. Simple as that, by all accounts...
Jo
Indeed, the SuSE YAST2 online update is as easy as it gets. You click on the update button, it tells you what updates are available and which of those it recommends for your system, you decide what you think you need and then click on a button for it to download and install. You can automate the whole procedure as much or as little as you like.
A short while back, I decided to go through the security of my SuSE system and downloaded a SuSE hardening script, a firewall script and a security checker that checks my system for changes daily, weekly and monthly. It took 15 minutes to finish setting up everything. I thought the harden script would inconvenience me in some way but I haven't noticed it at all. Though when I look at files like /etc/hosts.deny, they are hardened versions with good security settings.
For what it is worth, SuSE claim to have had the first dedicated security team on any linux dist. and the previous team leader who still works for SuSE has a decent page you can grab the latest stuff from. http://www.suse.com/~marc
I'm sure all distributions are very security aware. Though I can only vouch for the convenience of SuSE.
Joss