Recipe: How to know when was the last update in Linux

Today we are going to write about the difference between the two main package managers. Last week we were setting up some systems to be ready for ISO 27000 audit and we needed to know when the last updates were installed in  Linux servers. We have two types of Linux distributions in the company, Debian and CentOS, we think that CentOS is more enterprise friendly, especially the package manager (yum) is more enterprise friendly than dpkg and here is an example.

In CentOS you need to execute the command yum history to get a report of the last software installed in the machine. In Debian on the other hand, you need to execute something like this, date -d @$(stat -c %Y /var/cache/apt/) and it just return the last day when apt-get installed a package, it looks more tricky and it is not a function of dpkg.

This kind of details, like update history, are very important to us because they are very annoying in day by day operation, so we strongly recommend CentOS instead of Debian for enterprise systems.