Installation guide

Package Management

6. Package Management

6.1. Strong Package Checksums

RPM provides support for signed packages using strong hash algorithms such as SHA-256 in

order to ensure package integrity and increase security. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 packages are

transparently compressed with the XZ lossless compression library, which implements the LZMA2

compression algorithm for greater compression (thus reducing package size) and faster unpacking

(when installing RPMs). Further information on the stronger package checksums is available in the

Deployment Guide

6.2. New Signing Key

All Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 packages are digitally signed with a new 4096-bit RSA hardware

signing key and using a SHA-256 hash. The RPM package signing

document gives details of this

new key.

6.3. The PackageKit Package Manager

Red Hat provides PackageKit for viewing, managing, updating, installing and uninstalling packages

and package groups. PackageKit allows for quick repository enablement and disablement, a graphical

and searchable transaction log, and PolicyKit integration. Further information on Package Kit is

available in the Deployment Guide

6.4. Yum

Via its plugin architecture, Yum provides new or enhanced support for various capabilities such as

delta RPMs (using the presto plugin), RHN communication (rhnplugin), and auditing and applying

—using a calculated least-invasive (minimal) number of updates—only relevant security fixes to a

system (security plugin).

Yum also ships with the yum-config-manager utility, which shows exhaustive information about all set

configuration options and parameters for each individual repository. Further information on updates to

Yum is available in the Deployment Guide

7. Clustering

Clusters are multiple computers (nodes) working in concert to increase reliability, scalability, and

availability to critical production services. High Availability using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 can be

deployed in a variety of configurations to suit varying needs for performance, high-availability, load

balancing, and file sharing.

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html-single/Deployment_Guide/index.html#ch-RPM

https://access.redhat.com/security/team/key/#package

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html-single/Deployment_Guide/index.html#ch-PackageKit

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html-single/Deployment_Guide/index.html#sec-Yum_Plugins