[rhn-users] Re: rhnsd daemon update

[Tsai Li Ming]

Jesse Becker wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 15, 2005 at 09:50:45PM +0800, Tsai Li Ming wrote:
> 
>>From the rhn website, "The Red Hat Network Daemon (rhnsd) periodically 
>>connects to Red Hat Network to check for updates and notifications."
>>
>>Does the rhnsd daemon perform system updates using up2date 
>>automatically, similar to yumd? If not, can up2date be configured to 
> 
> 
> The rhnsd program will check for updates approximately once every two
> hours.  However, I have heard reports, and directly seen, that rhnsd
> will occasionally get stuck, and do nothing at all until it is restarted.  
> 
> 
>>update the system automatically without having to use a cron job?
> 
> 
> This is the purpose of rhnsd.  However, I have found it more reliable to
> simply run /usr/sbin/rhn_check from cron. 

Does rhnsd update the system automatically, similar to doing a up2date 
-u in a cron? The default rhnsd runs for every 4 hours. Updates were not 
installed when I started rhnsd and left it running for a day and there's 
nothing in the /var/log/message except it is running rhn_check. 
Furthermore, when I ran rhn_check -v as root, there are no outputs.

I'm running up2date-4.2.57-2.

> Digging through the rhnsd source code, it appears to do three things:  
> 	1) Call rhn_check every 120 minutes.
> 	2) Jitter the 120 min delay time slightly so not all hosts slam
> 	   the RHN servers all at once.
> 	3) provide some very limited logging.
> 
> I've had the rhnsd program freeze on me enough times that I no longer use it.
> Instead, I have the following in cron, and it seems to work well:
> 	
> 	0 */2 * * * perl -e 'sleep rand(3600)'; /usr/sbin/rhn_check	
>