How do I configure my Linux server to automatically apply software updates?

You Red Hat Enterprise Linux server may already be configured to automatically apply security and bug fix updates via Red Hat Network. To verify:

grep do_update /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf
service yum-updatesd status

If the output doesn’t show that updates are enabled and yum-updatesd is running, enable automatic updates with the following commands:

cp /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf.`date +%Y%m%d.%H%M%S`
sed -i 's/do_update = no/do_update = yes/g' /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf
sed -i 's/do_download = no/do_download = yes/g' /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf
sed -i 's/do_download_deps = no/do_download_deps = yes/g' /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf
service yum-updatesd restart
You will need to reboot to apply any disruptive software updates, such as kernel updates. Automatically updating the kernel may require drivers not provided by Red Hat to be rebuilt.