Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 patching

Ray Van Dolson rvandolson at esri.com
Tue Mar 8 15:11:22 UTC 2011


On Tue, Mar 08, 2011 at 06:44:28AM -0800, Matty Sarro wrote:
> To be honest I suppose it isn't. However with Solaris you have the
> option of downloading a rollup for any given day. You cannot do this
> with yum, at least not running yum update (unless the downloadonly
> plugin does that, i'm not familiar with it). You can then take this
> rollup and apply it to any server and be assured that they are exactly
> the same both in the lab and in production.
> 
> It's been hell trying to get servers updated initially, and then
> keeping that as a baseline. I'll need to look into this downloadonly
> plugin. Also, does it avoid the problem of yum refusing to install the
> packages because they're signed? I've had a terrible time trying to
> get updates installed on boxes, even when i disable the signature
> check in the repo settings.

Personally, I so much prefer the yum style of patching vs Solaris'
roll-up model (ugh).  We use PCA on the Solaris side whenever
possible...

That said, in your case maybe you could use something like mrepo to
mirror RHN to an intermediary box then make those packages available to
your RHEL clients periodically via private network or rsync'ing the
tree to physical media and setting up a file-based yum repo on each box
you need to patch and distributing via Sneakernet or whatever your
procedure is...

Ray




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