The release is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9

Apr 5, 2017 23:14 GMT  ·  By

CentOS developer and maintainer Johnny Hughes is pleased to announce today, April 5, 2017, the release and general availability of the CentOS Linux 6.9 operating system.

Derived from the freely distributed source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9, which is the last update to the 6.x series of the operating system, CentOS Linux 6.9 borrows all of its security patches and internal components. This also appears to be the last point release for the CentOS 6.x operating system series.

"All upstream variants have been placed into one combined repository to make it easier for end users. Workstation, server, and minimal installs can all be done from our combined repository. All of our testing is only done against this combined distribution," said Johnny Hughes in the mailing list announcement.

What's new in CentOS Linux 6.9

Prominent features of the CentOS Linux 6.9 release include TLS 1.2 support in GnuTLS, the ability for the sssd, libvirt, krb5-server, ipa-server, rsyslog7, vsftpd, postfix, and 389-ds-base packages to select which cipher suites are allowed, as well as better TLS support for the IO::Socket:SSL and Net::SSLeay Perl modules.

CentOS Linux 6.9 drops support for non-secure cryptographic algorithms and protocols, including MD5, RC4, SHA0, and DH parameters that are smaller than 1024 bits. It also introduces two new tools, cloud-init for configuring new cloud instances and clufter for analyzing and converting cluster configuration files.

The cpuid utility has been added as well in CentOS Linux 6.9 to help users view information about the CPUs available in the system where the distro is installed, the pacemaker component received support for alert agents so it can react better to cluster events, and a new smartPQI driver is available for Microsemi storage adapters.

Other than that, CentOS Linux 6.9 updates the megaraid_sas and mpt3sas storage drivers to support more devices, supports prevention of hostname change by the network initialization scripts when NO_DHCP_HOSTNAME is set in /etc/sysconfig/network, and updates the ca-certificates package to support Mozilla's latest CAs.

Talking about network improvements, CentOS Linux 6.9 lets you add "dns=none" to /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf if you don't want to let NetworkManager update the /etc/resolv.conf file. It also looks like there's a new guest-set-user-password command for setting user passwords in QEMU/KVM VMs.

CentOS Linux 6.9 is available for download right now on our website and it comes as LiveDVD ISO images for 64-bit (x86_64) and 32-bit (i386) hardware architectures that can be written to USB flash drives or DVD discs. Upgrading is recommended to all users of the CentOS 6.x operating system series.