UnixGuru

When you get a freshly delivered VPS, you should always patch it before your use it for production purposes.

 

If you are using RedHat / CentOS / Fedora or CloudLinux this is acheievd using the following command.

As root:

 

yum update

 

The output will be a list of packages which need updating. You can review this and then choose Y to go ahead with the patches or N to abort the patching.

"yum update -y" can be used to patch everything without giving a report first.

 

 

If you are using a Debian or Ubuntu Linux distribution, then you need two commands one after the other.

Both as root

 

apt-get update

apt-get upgrade

 

Two these two commands will update all of the packages on your VPS to the latest upstream versions.