IIAB/Security

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

The following applies to Debian, Raspbian (and presumably Ubuntu?) servers

• In 2016, several chose to run the following quasi-weekly:

  apt-get update
  apt-get upgrade    or    apt-get dist-upgrade
  apt-get autoclean
  apt-get autoremove    (some consider this last step risky, though no known IIAB/XSCE problems have resulted)

• In 2017, James Cameron suggested one may also use "apt" instead of "apt-get" like this;

  apt update
  apt full-upgrade
  apt-get clean      may be more comprehensive than "apt-get autoclean"

Also he suggests there's a package for automated unattended upgrades, called "unattended-upgrades" for those willing who require that (and are willing to bear the risks!)

The following applies to CentOS and Fedora servers

• 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" (followed by "yum clean all" among those who were daring) but arguably that still 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!)

Security Blowback / Survival Tips

• 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. NEW PROGNOSIS FEB 2017: Josh Dennis may move IIAB/XSCE to http://box/docs based on http://Nextcloud.com, which has stronger community support than ownCloud.