Unit 7 Worksheet - Package Management & Patching

Instructions

Fill out the worksheet as you progress through the lab and discussions. Hold your worksheets until the end to turn them in as a final submission packet.

Resources / Important Links

Downloads

The worksheet has been provided below. The document(s) can be transposed to the desired format so long as the content is preserved. For example, the .txt could be transposed to a .md file.

Unit 7 Recording

Discussion Post #1

  1. Why is software versioning so important to software security?

  2. Can you find 3 reasons, from the internet, AI, or your peers?

Discussion Post #2

Scenario:

You are new to a Linux team. A ticket has come in from an application team and has already been escalated to your manager.

They want software installed on one of their servers but you cannot find any documentation. Your security team is out to lunch and not responding.

You remember from some early documentation that you read that all the software in the internal repos you currently have are approved for deployment on servers. You want to also verify by checking other servers that this software exists.

This is an urgent task and your manager is hovering.

  1. How can you check all the repos on your system to see which are active?

  2. How would you check another server to see if the software was installed there?

  3. If you find the software, how might you figure out when it was installed? (Time/Date)

Discussion Post #3

Scenario:

Looking at the concept of group install from DNF or Yum. Why do you think an administrator may never want to use that in a running system? Why might an engineer want to or not want to use that? This is a thought exercise, so it’s not a “right or wrong” answer it’s for you to think about.

  1. What is the concept of software bloat, and how do you think it relates?

  2. What is the concept of a security baseline, and how do you think it relates?

  3. How do you think something like this affects performance baselines?

Submit your input by following the link below.

The discussion posts are done in Discord threads. Click the 'Threads' icon on the top right and search for the discussion post.

Definitions

Yum:

DNF:

Repo:

GPG Key:

Software dependency:

Software version:

Semantic Version:

Digging Deeper

  1. What is semantic versioning? https://semver.org/

Reflection Questions

  1. What questions do you still have about this week?

  2. How does security as a system administrator differ from what you expected?