AGIX Discussion All HowTo's Linux Redhat, Fedora and CentOS Linux Ubuntu, Mint & Debian Linux

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 – an overview of changes

Red Hat has provided a short PDF document describing the changes and new features in RHEL 7. There isn’t much that has changed in the way you’d administer a RHEL system except for a handful of components such as the new firewall (firewalld), network control and service control.

I’d say you’ll most likely need to research the following items:

  • Networking: NetworkManager has two new user interfaces: a command-line tool (nmcli) and a curses-based, text user interface (TUI). Nmcli is intended for administrators who prefer command-line access for managing network services and is useful for remote network administration and managing headless servers. The TUI replaces system-config-network-tui and simplifies configuring many network settings for those who do not want to edit configuration files directly.
  • Firewall: With firewalld, a firewall does not have to be stopped in order to change its rules. This increases the security of the system by eliminating vulnerability and adding the ability to respond to threats by quickly activating new rules. In addition to dynamic configuration capabilities, firewalld supports a powerful rules language that simplifies configuring firewalls.
  • Filesystems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux now supports XFS file systems that are up to  500TB in size. The previous support limit was 100TB.
  • Service Management: Services are stopped, started and restarted in a different way now. For example, to check the status of the network, use “systemctl status network”. You can ensure it starts on boot like this “systemctl enable network”.
  • In-place Upgrade: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 beta provides support that simplifies the task of performing in-place upgrades. A pre-upgrade assistant package is provided in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 beta zstream, which reports what can be upgraded in-place and what will have to be done manually. The report describes the issues and links to knowledgebase articles available in the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Read the full document here:
https://access.redhat.com/sites/default/files/pages/attachments/rhel_whatsnewrhel7beta_techoverview_.pdf

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *