yum update best practices

[Doug Weimer]

On Sat, 08 Mar 2008, Jason Edgecombe wrote:

> I'm currently using cfengine on RHEL5 with a nightly yum update for two 
> machine configs for a total of 40 machines. I use a private yum repo 
> that I manually sync with upstream after some testing. I would recommend 
> excluding the kernel updates and having those be triggered manually or 
> explicitly using cfengine. So far, I'm manually triggering kernel 
> updates. I use openafs and vmware-server so I have some kernel-dependent 
> rpms that must be kept on sync. My biggest problem is that I need to 
> move to some way of locking some machines to certain versions of rpms. 
> That would make it easier to roll out updates to my workstations before 
> I push the updates to the servers.

Take a look at the cfengine packages action. It has rpm support and
allows you to match against specific package versions.

http://www.cfengine.org/docs/cfengine-Reference.html#packages

It's not extremely fast when testing hundreds of packages, so you may
still want to restrict the version checks to non-interactive or nightly runs.

Thanks,

Doug
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