Red Hat Network (abbreviated to RHN) is a system operated by Red Hat that makes updates, patches, and bug fixes of packages included within Red Hat Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux available to the public. Also RHN offers several other features including provisioning and monitoring of systems.
Users of these operating systems can then invoke the up2date or yum program to download and install updates from RHN. The updates portion of RHN is akin to other types of automatic system maintenance tools such as Microsoft Update for Microsoft Windows operating systems. The system requires a subscription to allow access to updates. In Fedora, updates are provided by Red Hat's free yum and apt repositories.