Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 released

calendar May 11, 2016 · 3 min read  ·
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Yesterday Red Hat released the 8th update of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The changes have been documented in the release and technical notes:

As usual, kernel driver updates were included. The following list also shows some of the further enhancements I'd like to mention:

  • Running RHEL as Hyper-V Generation 2 VM is now fully supported. This feature was already part of RHEL 6.6 as technical preview. Support for the TRIM command and reporting kernel crashes inside Event Viewer (ID 18590) has been added. For Azure Cloud setups an agent named WALinuxAgent is used for deployments.
  • SSLv2 support was removed - and cannot be re-enabled manually
  • SSSD now fully supports Smartcards for authentification. If a host is member of a Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) setup, the host password is updated frequently to avoid that the host is considered as inactive and removed from the directory.
  • The adcli command is now available
  • Openswan was replaced by Libreswan
  • The NTP client chrony is now available and replaces the ancient ntpd service. It is predicted to be more versatile - the package is already part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.
  • YUM now includes the search-disabled-repos plugin to notify the administrator if a missing dependency is part of a disable repository (default setting). This requires that the system uses subscription managers, conventional repositories are not supported. The plugin is also capable of automatically enabling disabled repositories to ensure that package dependencies are met (setting notify_only=0 in /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/search-disabled-repos.conf)
  • SELinux now supports GlusterFS
  • XFS supports up to bis zu 300 TB big file systems, previously it was limited to 100 TB
  • The echo intervals used by CIFS (which are sent every 60 seconds by default) can now be confiugred using the mount option echo_interval=n. It is recommended to use the following formula for setting the value: (2 * echo interval) + 17 seconds
  • dmstats is included as analytics utility for storage device leveraging the Device Mapper driver
  • Kickstart profiles can now be gathered via HTTPS
  • The tuned service now offers a profile for Oracle database servers (RPM package tuned-profiles-oracle). This profile is based on the enterprise-storage profile and includes essential kernel parameters required for Oracle
  • The IBM Java runtime environment has been updated to version 1.8
  • The remote client Vinagre now also supports RDP
  • 3D support using the vmwgfx driver using VMware Workstation 10
  • Relax and Recover (ReaR) has been added to the distribution - previously the package needed to be installed from the EPEL repository (Extra Packages for Linunx)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 is now available to all Red Hat customers with a valid subscription. On this year's 1.April Red Hat started offering free Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions for developers.

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