Chapter 12. General Updates

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 includes rebased samba packages that introduce several bug fixes and enhancements, the most important of which is added support for the SMB2 protocol. SMB2 support can be enabled with the following parameter in the [global] section of the /etc/samba/smb.conf file:

max protocol = SMB2

Additionally, Samba now has support for AES Kerberos encryption. AES support has been available in Microsoft Windows operating systems since Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. It is reported to be the new default Kerberos encryption type since Windows 7. Samba now adds AES Kerberos keys to the keytab it controls. This means that other kerberized services that use the samba keytab and run on the same machine can benefit from AES encryption. In order to use AES session keys (and not only use AES encrypted ticket granting tickets), the samba machine account in Active Directory's LDAP server needs to be manually modified. For more information, refer to the Microsoft Open Specifications Support Team Blog.

With Samba 3.6, it is suggested that if you use the security = share mode you should migrate to use security = user for a standalone file server or Domain Controller (DC). The security = share mode will not be supported in future releases. Refer to the smb.conf(5) manpage for more details on security = user and read the ACL documentation for permission control on files and directories.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 includes a new scipy package. The SciPy package provides software for mathematics, science, and engineering. The NumPy package, which is designed to manipulate large multi-dimensional arrays of arbitrary records, is the core library for SciPy. The SciPy library is built to work with NumPy arrays and provides various efficient numerical routines, for example routines for numerical integration and optimization.

The nss and nss-util packages have been upgraded to upstream version 3.14 to provide, among other features, support for TLS version 1.1. As well, the nspr package has been rebased to version 4.9.2. For more information, refer to the NSS 3.14 Release Notes.

The valgrind package has been upgraded to upstream version 3.8.1. This updated version contains, among other enhancements and bug fixes, an embedded gdbserver. For more information, refer to the Valgrind chapter and the Changes in Valgrind 3.8.1 appendix in the Red Hat Developer Toolset 1.1 User Guide.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 includes a new set of packages: libjpeg-turbo. These packages replace the traditional libjpeg packages, and provide the same functionality and API as libjpeg but better performance.

When installing the redhat-lsb package, a large number of dependencies are pulled into the system to meet the LSB standard. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 provides a new redhat-lsb-core subpackage which allows you to easily fetch only the minimal set of required packages by installing the redhat-lsb-core package.

The createrepo utility has been updated to the latest upstream version, which significantly reduces memory usage and adds multitasking support via the --workers option.