IIAB/Security

Some security tips that will become more professional as time goes on:

• The following applies to CentOS-based XSCE school servers, towards downloading and semi-automatically installing recent security patches & updates, that is if you have a reasonably fast connection, and are willing to take risks with certain packages breaking.

• Run yum -y update --security if your system already has yum-security installed, typically via yum install yum-security(this appears preinstalled within CentOS 7.x). Be warned that --security unfortunately updates very few packages, and is not prompt in updating (administrators may prefer to run "yum update openssl", "yum update openvpn" and similar frequently, to stay up-to-date with critical CentOS ESR packages/services).

• Please also consider commands:
  • yum updateinfo list security all
  • yum updateinfo list security installed
  • yum updateinfo list security available

• In the past we ran "yum update" or "yum -y update" but (arguably) that installs far too many untested and diverse updates/upgrades across the board, adding features not directly related to security. However this is still the way to go IF you want ALL packages updated (and are willing to face many unintended consequences, with a professional Linux administration staff to recover!)

• If you notice Wikipedia-like items are no longer accessible from http://schoolserver.lan, try running the following as root:

 xsce-make-kiwix-lib
 systemctl restart kiwix-serve

• If ownCloud updates itself, users visiting http://schoolserver.lan/owncloud may face error message "You don't have permission to access /owncloud on this server." Fix guideline forthcoming from Tim Moody. REVISED: Josh Dennis may move IIAB/XSCE to http://box/docs based on http://Nextcloud.com, which has stronger community support than ownCloud.