U2 reset configuration

[Ed Griffin <edg ll mit edu>]

Sorry if this has been previously discussed, however I just completed a 
very annoying upgrade of 100 or so RHEL3 boxes from U1 to U2.  On all of 
them several services which I had explicitly turned off were now turned 
back on...

firstboot
sendmail
iptables
ip6tables
mdmpd
mdmonitor

Now in the case of most of these it was not a problem, the problem arose 
when on about 60% of my systems iptables was reenabled and denied all 
traffic to the system.  Most of these are rack mounted servers which are 
headless, I had to drag out a head and connect to each one which was 
quite a pain in the ...

Now I don't know what the thought was, if RedHat thinks they know my 
environment better than me and that they should take it upon themselves 
to change my configurations, but as you can probably tell I am not happy 
with RedHat right now.  If this happens in a future upgrade, well I do 
believe I will be looking towards another vendors solution.

And before you ask, yes I did test this U2 package on about 10 systems 
prior to deploying it to the remaining 100, however those ten must have 
fallen into the 40% where although the services were re-enabled I was 
still able to access the systems and turn them off prior to them causing 
anytype of problem.  In addition I did remove these packages from the 
affected systems so that I won't be bitten by this again in the future.  
The reason they are there is because I use 1 kickstart server for all my 
installations with one standard config then I enable or disable services 
on an as needed basis, it makes it easier to reprovision these servers 
at a later date if they are already configured as all the others are.

It is my contention that RedHat should be responsible enough in their 
package upgrades to check the current state of the package and not make 
changes which can effect the way the system operates.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

--Ed

--
*****************************************************************
Ed Griffin
Assistant Network/System Administrator
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Weather Sensing Group
(781) 981-2871
mailto:edg ll mit edu
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