Red Hat today is announcing the general availability of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 (RHEL) milestone. RHEL 6.7 has been in beta deployments since May and is the seventh update to RHEL 6 since the server operating system first debuted in November of 2010.
While Red Hat’s leading edge of enterprise Linux is now its RHEL 7.x platform, RHEL 6.x is still being updated and supported as part of Red Hat’s 10-year supported life cycle. RHEL 6.x is in the Production Phase One segment of its lifecycle, meaning it still gets new features, in addition to security and bug fixes.
From the beta period to general availability today, Steve Almy, product manager, Platforms Business Unit at Red Hat, explained to ServerWatch that here have been no significant changes or challenges beyond Red Hat’s normal process of backporting and hardening features for Red Hat’s enterprise customer base.
Security Enhancements in RHEL 6.7
One of the new security features in RHEL 6.7 is the ability to configure udev mounts as read-only.
“This gives customers a way to restrict their users’ ability to write data to removable media, such as USB thumb drives,” Almy said. “While seemingly simple, this addition helps system administrators combat a substantial source of data leakage in their environments.”
Additionally, RHEL 6.7 now includes the SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) Workbench, which Almy noted makes accessible to more system administrators the SCAP feature that measures compliance for servers to security standards, and allows them to tailor the criteria to their organization-specific standards.
Red Hat Access Insights Now Available for RHEL 6.7 Users
Looking beyond just features, Red Hat has a new service called Red Hat Access Insights that is now being made available to RHEL 6.7 users.
“Red Hat Access Insights offers an additional support-based service to our customers above and beyond their existing subscription,” Almy explains. “Essentially, it provides a dashboard view of known potential risks in their specific system deployment and recommends solutions to those issues.”
Almy commented that in the past, tracking this set of details across a server deployment required a lot of effort and was still error-prone, thanks in large part to the significant human element of this task.
He added that the logic inherent to Red Hat Access Insights allowing the service to analyze system configurations and provide proactive recommendations is based on the Red Hat Support organization’s wealth of experience, and represents a value-add for Red Hat customers.
Almy said that pricing details for the Red Hat Access Insights service are still being finalized, and certain aspects of the service may require additional cost.
Moving forward now that RHEL 6.7 is generally available, new features are in development for the next point releases of both RHEL 6.x and RHEL 7.x.
“Both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 are derived from the same upstream projects and communities, most notably Fedora, which provides the clearest look at the features pipeline for Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” Almy said.
“Generally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7 will both continue to receive security and stability enhancements,” Almy continued. “From a feature perspective, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will emphasize stability and predictability while Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will focus on broader feature innovation without sacrificing reliability for mission-critical deployments.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.