Security Advice for a Linux box running Plesk

[jaedus]

I've recently read a couple posts related to security issues with packages that are part of plesk etc on these forums, but they're old so I'm looking for a potentially new perspective.

I've got a linux box out in the wilderness running the most up to date version of plesk. There are currently exploits for some of the packages plesk uses (mostly in the application pack) and some with stuff unrelated to plesk (ie: openssl).

Now for the most part it's fallen behind due to my own negligence. But I've never seen any security updates feature in Plesk. Short of the major releases it just doesn't seem to happen with any kind of response time. And I've held off using yum or updating manually for fear of breaking plesk.

So here's my question, to the experienced sysadmins out there:

What do you do? How do you effectively manage your updates without breaking plesk? In your experience will it be safe for me to stay on top of security fixes without breaking plesk? Or are you just doing like me and letting it ride behind current patch levels a certain amount?

Any help/advice here would be greatly appreciated. My plesk server doesn't have much traffic yet but it's constantly growing and I want to get on the right track before I have a bad situation on my hands.

 

[phoenixisp]

Check out ART's site, http://www.atomicrocketturtle.com. His yum project is developed with Plesk in mind. He even has a channel to update the App Vault.

 

[jaedus]

Sweetness. It's 1:26AM here so I'm just going to browse it and hit the sack. But I'll check it out this weekend and post back about how it goes. Looks very promising. Thanks in advance

 

[jaedus]

Well I guess this is obsolete now anyway...what with rh9 not showing on the list of support OS's for plesk 8....

 

[atomicturtle]

Not that it matters much for the PSA 8 users, but I have no plans on stopping development on RH9. I'll maintain it as long as there is community interest.