Download CentOS 6.8

CentOS is an open source operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux that is designed for use in enterprise environments. The name is an abbreviation of Community Enterprise Operating System. Unlike RHEL, CentOS is free to use. In terms of popularity, CentOS has been on the top of the list in the last twelve months eighth place. A new version of CentOS appears every two years, which is then provided with updates for seven years. Version 7.0 of CentOS is almost two years old and now another update from the 6.x branch has appeared. The full release notes for this release are here to find. In short, these are the main changes:

Major changes

• libreswan replaces openswan as VPN endpoint solution (support added in NetworkManager)
• sssd has a number of new capabilities and now supports smart cards, support for SSLv2 has been disabled
• XFS support increased to a maximum file system size of 300TB
• various applications now support TLSv1.2, ie OpenLDAP, yum, stunnel, vsftpd, git, postfix and others. Also TLSv1.2 has been enabled by default in various packages
• various applications now support elliptic-curve parameters, ie Perl Net:SSLeay or Perl IO::Socket::SSL
• dmidecode now supports SMBIOS 3.0.0
• kickstart files can now be pulled from https sources
• chrony has been added as an alternative to NTPd
• squid 3.4 is available as a replacement to squid 3.1
• enhancements have been made for guests running Hyper-V ie reporting kernel crashes to the hypervisor or running as a generation 2 guest
• New package rear can be used to continuously create recovery images
• SSLv3 and older insecure protocols are disabled by default, and various packages now have more configuration options to select the desired protocols
• libreoffice has been rebased to 4.3.7.2
• various packages have been rebased to more current version ie elfutils, SystemTap, ipmitool, memtest86+, icedtea-web, various hardware drivers, shadow utils, virt-who and others