Even though my job title is "Web Developer" at the organization I work for, I have also become one of the server administrators / office techies / and handy man.

I am working on a backup solution for downloading our website files (from a remote datacenter) onto an external hard drive in our local office, and am trying to update rsync. I have shell root access.

When I issue I get amongst all the other information. Obviously this is an old version of rsync. According to rsync's website, the current version is 3.0.6. Unfortunately, I have a Windows computer as my office work station, but at least I've been able to install cygwin. Rsync version 3.0.4 is installed on cygwin.

So, on the RedHat server, I tried running: and this is what I get:
I emailed the datacenter, who is supposed to be keeping our system up to date, and they responded with the following:

So why hasn't Redhat updated rsync in their repositories? Or is there something else that I'm missing? Any ideas?

Hi.

RedHat's quite a conservative distro - they don't generally use upstream software at the latest version.

Any particular reason you want to update?

Dave

Hey Dave,
This makes sense. I don't really have a reason to update except for possible security updates. I looked over the status of our server yesterday and found quite a few outdated packages when I ran . Those have since been taken care of, but I was just confused as to why the latest version of rsync wasn't being provided by the RedHat repositories.

After I reviewed rsync's website, it looks like this could even be a security issue in some customized cases. Fortunately, we do not fall into this category and so I don't think that updating rsync from version 2.6.8 would address any security concerns.

So basically, I'm using rsync and I wanted to make sure I had the latest, most stable, most secure version before I really got underway in my project.

- David

Usually latest is diametrically opposed to stable and most secure. Software versions have to be around a while to find the bugs in it(stable) and they need real world exposure to check for security.

Be aware that many packages are held at a particular major release number in RH and they will do so for the entire life cycle of that particular version. For example RHEL5.0 came with a 2.6.18 based kernel and RHEL5.7(or however high they go) will also have a 2.6.18 based kernel. However they do back patch those versions with updated security and hardware support. The current kernel (2.6.18-128.4.1) is in reality much closer to a vanilla .26 kernel than it is to a .18 vanilla kernel(both in security and hardware support). This is the way many packages are handled in RHEL.

Edit: If you want to use 3rd party repos rsync3.0.6-1 is available from rpmforge.

Red Hat backport security fixes therefore 2.6.8 on Red Hat is not really the same vanilla 2.6.8 you find on the rsync website.

See:
http://www.redhat.com/security/updat...g/?sc_cid=3093