Up2Date still having problems...

Paul W. Frields paul at frields.com
Wed Oct 29 18:11:08 UTC 2003


On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 11:16, Josh McKenna wrote:
> if I do an up2date -u --nosig everything works fine...
> sometimes...
> the exception seems to be when a new package is available
> for a package I have installed, but the new package has a
> new dependency that I have NOT met previously...

I think I just described my fix to someone else on the list, but in case
you missed it... I keep a local FTP/HTTP mirror of both the base distro
(severn3/FC-0.95) and rawhide. Rawhide gets updated via rsync roughly
nightly. I use the same cron job as the rsync update to also do a
yum-arch to rewrite the yum repo headers. (The yum headers for the base
distro obviously only needed to be written once since they don't
change.)

My clients use yum to point to both of those sources, "base" and
"rawhide". As a result, up2date works perfectly here -- well, at least
as far as this issue goes.

> p.s. - is there gonna be a channel on RHN for Fedora Core
> when the general release is done? I blew $500 of my
> employers money a month ago to buy enterprise entitlements
> for RH9, and it feels like I've wasted the money if I can't
> keep them up on the latest release...

I know there are Red Hat employees on this list, but to save their
valuable time, and not to assume any kind of mantle, I think the answer
to your question is probably a resounding "no." RHN is a paid service
and RH is pretty smart to conserve their bandwidth for their paying
customers. FC customers will largely be the "freebie" base. There's no
reason why their current rawhide support has to stop (i.e. the yum
repo[s]), but I would imagine keeping rawhide out of RHN allows them to
do some fairly fancy netfilter footwork, to ensure that RHN customers
always trump us freeloaders. (No bitterness intended, I fully agree with
them if this is the case.)

Remember that your entitlements still get you patch support and
enterprise-type management options that you simply don't have with
Fedora Core. "Keeping [systems] up on the latest release" is not why you
pay for entitlements; they give you support and/or management options
you don't have otherwise.

> I know they want me to buy RHEL, but I just can justify
> that for mail gateways and dns servers...

Then Fedora Core, along with the increasing number of yum/apt
repositories, might serve you fine. Keep in mind the point of the Fedora
Project, and its origins -- over time, it's probably reasonable to think
Fedora Core relases could happen even faster than those under the Red
Hat Linux banner. A review of the project site at
http://fedora.redhat.com might be useful.

Of course, only you can weigh the security repercussions of your
decisions on your company's IT infrastructure. If you feel comfortable,
given its mission and timetables, with using Fedora Core (or an older
EOL Red Hat Linux product) in the capacities you describe, that's your
prerogative. Remember that in terms of "free-of-cost" distros, Fedora
Core and Red Hat Linux 9 are only two of many alternatives for someone
who is a skilled and security-educated administrator.

The entire foregoing is my $0.02 and is subject to your personal rate of
exchange. :-)

> maybe they could add a rawhide channel to RHN?

See above, best of luck, and cheers.

-- 
Paul W. Frields <paul at frields.com>





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