[redhat-list] sftp error question

[mark]

On 05/02/13 07:35, Constance Morris wrote:
> Hi everyone, I'm new to this list, so I apologize if my email is not in
> keeping with the procedures. I am a newbie with RHEL 5.7 system
> administration and recently registered our web server with Red Hat (this
> past Monday). Upon registration, I noticed online that the server needed
> 506 updates and so I set the auto errata to enabled. By the time, I
> realized my mistake there were only 217 updates left to be done. I
> changed the auto errata to disabled and locked the account to stop the
> rest from going through on their own.

Hi, Constance,

You've probably got several things going on.

First, finish the full updates, really. 5.7 is several years old - it's now 
on 5.9, for the 5.x branch (the 6.x is up to 6.4 as of several months ago) 
and if you type lsb_release -a, that's what you should see. Having it partly 
updated is asking for trouble, esp. if interrelated packages are not all 
installed, such as an application like apache, but libraries it needs aren't 
updated.

Second, when you do a reboot, it *will* have major issues, unless you finish 
that update, for the reason above.

Third, if this is a server, and *esp* if it's a production machine, I would 
recommend turning off yum-updatesd (that's the auto-updated; it doesn't 
exist in 6.x) - you should consider the updates, and coordinate if there's 
something that your users might see, like NFS or apache, etc.
>
> Immediately following, I was unable to use Putty to ssh to the web
> server. A co-worker worked with me to get us access again by updating the

And, presumably, restarting sshd (service sshd restart).

> sshd_config file. However, we have some clients who use Expression Web 4
> to update sites and they cannot gain access. It says "There's no site
> named 'blah' " when they try to login.

This would have to do with the apache configuration (httpd); that's in 
/etc/httpd/conf and /etc/httpd/conf.d Sounds to me as though the virtual 
hosts are messed up, or possibly that you have secondary IPs, for which you 
need to look at /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts.

*Do* run yum update regularly. RH should be emailing you about updates; 
anything labelled "critical" (like firefox) should be done that day; 
important, if you read what it fixes and find that it affects you, in the 
next couple of days. What I did at work, several years ago, was to talk to 
the system owners, and set up a regular monthly maintenance window, when I 
could do full updates - bug and security fixes - and reboot as needed. And 
they make sure their users know of the window.

	mark