CentOS 6.9 Released, Supported until November 2020

Johnny Hughes has announced the release of CentOS 6.9, a Red Hat-sponsored Linux distribution built from the source code for the recently-released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.9. This is the project's legacy branch supported until November 2020. From the release announcement

CentOS as a group is a community of open source contributors and users. Typical CentOS users are organisations and individuals that do not need strong commercial support in order to achieve successful operation. CentOS is 100% compatible rebuild of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in full compliance with Red Hat's redistribution requirements. CentOS is for people who need an enterprise class operating system stability without the cost of certification and support.

Welcome to the CentOS 6.9 release. CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by Red Hat1.

CentOS conforms fully with Red Hat's redistribution policy and aims to be functionally compatible. CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.

Similar to the practice of the upstream vendor, there is no supported path to 'upgrade' an installation of a prior major CentOS release (CentOS 5) to a new major release. This is not a CentOS imposed limitation, but rather reflects the upstream's approach on this matter. People who feel adventuresome and want to experiment are reminded to take and test backups first. As a note to people who attempt the upgrade in spite of this warning, such as by the unsupported upgradeany option from the media install command line, please note that you will need to manually retrieve the current centos-release package, manually do a rpm -e --nodeps removal of the prior centos-release package, and then manually install the CentOS 6 centos-release package, before yum can have any chance of working properly.

The Continuous Release (CR) repository makes generally available packages that will appear in the next point release of CentOS, on a testing and hotfix basis until formally released.

Please read through the other sections before trying an install or reporting an issue.

NOTE: There is NO mechanism to pick only partial upgrades of packages to CentOS-6.9. All packages and updates to the 6.9 tree are built against the 6.9 tree and may not work correctly with older 6.x packages. If you want some packages in 6.9, please upgrade all packages. You will have issues if you perform only partial updates.

Major changes Of CentOS 6.9

Due to size constraints of CDs, there is no longer a LiveCD. Keeping the size small enough would have required removing everything that makes a GUI desktop functional. The LiveDVD can be copied to a USB key and used if required.
GnuTLS now supports TLS v1.2. All packages in CentOS utilizing cryptography now support TLS v1.2.
postfix, vsftpd, rsyslog7, ipa-server, 389-ds-base, krb5-server, sssd and libvirt have improved functionality for selecting which cipher suites are allowed.
Net::SSLeay and IO::Socket:SSL Perl modules have been improved for better TLS support.
Support for insecure cryptographic protocols and algorithms has been dropped. This affects usage of MD5, SHA0, RC4 and DH parameters shorter than 1024 bits.
cloud-init, a tool for configuring new cloud instances, has now been added. Please see the entry on cloud-init in the "Known issues" section below.
pacemaker now supports alert agents, allowing more flexibility in reacting to events in the cluster.
clufter, a tool for converting and analyzing cluster configuration files, has been rebased to version 0.59.8.
ca-certificates has been updated to include the latest certificate authorities as provided by the Mozilla Foundation.
A new package cpuid is now available for displaying information about the CPUs in the system.
Setting NO_DHCP_HOSTNAME in /etc/sysconfig/network to true will prevent network initialization scripts from changing the hostname.
If you don't want to let NetworkManager update your /etc/resolv.conf, you can now add dns=none to /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf to achieve this.
A new smartPQI driver for Microsemi storage adapters is now available.
mpt3sas and megaraid_sas storage drivers have been updated to support more devices.
guest-set-user-password allows setting the password for any user in a QEMU/KVM virtual machine.