One of the most important aspects of maintaining a system is the update or patch management process. It's vital that we keep our system up to date in order to reduce bugs and ensure that any security vulnerabilities in our software are fixed as soon as possible. When updating our Asterisk server, there are three main areas to maintain:
The Asterisk service itself
The various components that Asterisk depends on (DAHDI, LibPRI, festival, and so on)
The host OS and any supplementary tools installed (OpenSSH, mpg123, and so on)
When we discussed setting up the Asterisk server, we covered installing from the CVS source repository, which is an easy way to keep Asterisk up to date, as you can continually download the latest version.
If we were to manage all applications as source packages only, we would need to go through the steps given in the installation chapter for each component as updates are released. However, when we factor in the updates for the tools of the...