Mark J Cox : When do we push most advisories?

mark :: blog

11 Nov 2011: When do we push most advisories?

We pushed an update to Flash Player for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Supplementary today, on a Friday, because it fixed Critical vulnerabilities. But we try not to push updates on a Friday unless they are critical and already public.

So let's take a look at the most common times and days we push advisories for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5, and 6 (including Supplementary) using a heatmap:

heatmap

The more advisories pushed for a given date and hour, the darker that section of the graph is. So the most popular times for pushing advisories are Tuesdays at 10am and 2pm Eastern US time, Fridays are pretty light for pushes, and there was nothing during the weekends. The spread of the graph shows that we push advisories when they are ready, rather than waiting to a fixed day and time, in order to reduce the risk to users.

All the data used to create this graph is available as part of our public metrics. Thanks to Sami Kerola for the R code from which I based my graph generation.

Created: 11 Nov 2011
Tagged as: fedora, metrics, red hat, security

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Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

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