A new version of CentOS 7 is available. We are very happy about it because it means that the development is more and more alive. In particular, I am talking about the maintenance version compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6.
In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, I allow you to say that CentOS is perhaps the most robust community Linux distribution for servers. Of course, this is something that is not an absolute truth, since Ubuntu server and Debian are great options too. However, CentOS 7 has binary compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux which makes the software 100% compatible on both Linux distributions.
Broadly speaking, this new version does not stand out for the novelties itself, because there has not been a new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but rather a set of security-oriented updates. Therefore, their developers encourage sysadmin to apply the updates as soon as possible.
Some features of CentOS 7 (1810)
Some of the most outstanding features of this new version, which I insist, is a security revision-oriented are:
- SSL-capabilities have been added to Net::SMTP.
- Open-JDK-11 is now available.
- pNFS SCSI is no longer a Technology Preview.
- Thunderbolt-3 interfaces are now supported.
- CentOS-7 can report bugs directly to bugs.centos.org.
In this new version, many updated packages are available such as samba, pki-core, gcc-libraries, elf-utils, ipset or firewalld. This will ensure you have many security patches applied.
On the other hand, Red Hat Enterprise Linux inherits the TLS 1.3 update and nftables as firewalls. It also incorporates enhancements to Kubernetes support.
As I said before, CentOS developers encourage to update as soon as possible, it is possible to do it simply with the following command:
:~$ yum update
If on the other hand, you want to do a new installation, in this site you can find the images for 64bits types of equipment (x86_64). Enough for any new server.
CentOS 7 with IBM?
Finally, CentOS 7 is under the protection of Red Hat, see if this will continue after the purchase of Red Hat by IBM. Everything seems to indicate that it would after it was announced that the company would work independently of IBM. So we’ll see.
Please share this article with your friends.
