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Red Hat Linux - updates

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Updating a Red Hat system

Updating a Red Hat system can be done a number of ways:
  • Use the RPM Freshen command (rpm -F)
    • Use local media (download the updates)
    • NFS mount the update directory
  • Use yum
  • Use up2date

Red Hat Linux provides a local mirror of updates for all the versions of Red Hat. These updates are obtained by rsyncing with multiple Official Red Hat Mirror sites. Newer versions are rsynced every two hours. Older versions are limited to what we could find on archives in the past. You can use rsync or http to download these updates at any time. From the LSU campus, you may also NFS mount the update directory.

To find the updates on our mirror, select the Red Hat version you are interested in from the menu on the left and then choose updates. You will find a series of directories here that group the updates by architecture (i386, i586, i686, athlon, noarch). You can determine the architecture of an installed RPM on your system by typing: rpm --queryformat '%{name} %{arch}\n' -q <package name>

In the past, we have operated a current server. Current is an open source server that works with Red Hat's up2date client that was originally developed at Duke University. Current is/was a wonderful product. Unfortunately, development appears to have stalled (Lead resigned early February 2004 and has not been replaced). Current does not have a version that works on our server. For this reason, we will not run the current server in the future.

Instead, we support yum. yum that was also developed at Duke University. Our Red Hat releases 7.0 and newer have the necessary headers generated to support yum. Clients exist for Red Hat 7.3 and beyond (the 7.3 client should work backwards to 7.0). Please visit yum for more info about yum.

Available Linux Update

You can access the Red Hat updates by visiting:

You can keep your Red Hat system updated, with current versions and security patches, by refreshing your installed RPMs against this directory. The easiest way to do this is to mount, via NFS, the updates filesystem on your local machine (only allowed across LSU network). You'll need to make sure your NFS services are running:

  • service portmap start -- start the portmapper to handle RPCs
  • service netfs start -- start the biods to handle NFS mounts

Now you need somewhere to mount the updates:

  • mkdir -p /mnt/updates
  • touch /mnt/updates/nfs.not.mounted

This way, if you cd into your /mnt/updates and you see the nfs.not.mounted file, you know that the NFS filesystem isn't mounted yet. To actually mount the filesystem it's easiest to insert a line in the /etc/fstab:

    linux.lsu.edu:/lvm/redhat/dist/9/updates /mnt/updates nfs noauto,ro,bg,intr,soft,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,retry=25,timeo=3 0 0

Note that this is one long line and should be entered as such in /etc/fstab.

Then mount the filesystem with:

    mount /mnt/updates

If you do not add the above entry to your /etc/fstab, you can do a dynamic mount with the following command: You will need to actually mount the updates:

  • mount linux.lsu.edu:/lvm/redhat/dist/9/updates /mnt/updates
On some Red Hat installs, this will fail because the ipchains or iptables firewall is blocking all NFS traffic. The easiest short-term solution is to turn off ipchains or iptables before you do your NFS mounts:

    service ipchains stop

Now that the NFS filesystem is mounted, you can perform your updates. The RedHat Package Manager or RPM provides a way to upgrade already installed packages by using the freshen option: -F. Change into your updates directory ( cd /mnt/updates ) and freshen your RPMs:

    rpm -Fvh *.rpm

In most cases, this will fail the first time! Sometimes this fails because there are two newer versions of a fileset, i.e. fileset-1.2.i386.rpm and fileset-1.3.i386.rpm. Unfortunately, RPM isn't smart enough to figure out which one to upgrade to (newer version of RPM do not usually have this problem). The solution is to upgrade that one fileset by hand:

    rpm -Fvh fileset-version.i386.rpm

Eventually, you should be able to get all your installed filesets upgraded (if not, contact Isaac, Brian or Allen and we'll help). For security reasons, you should unmount the NFS upgrade and shutoff all the NFS services on your machine:

  • umount /mnt/updates
  • service netfs stop
  • service portmap stop
    and if you turned off ipchains, start it again:
  • service ipchains start

Once you get all of your RPMs upgraded, you need to stay upgraded. The Red Hat Linux machine checks for updates several times a day, placing new upgrades in the upgrades NFS filesystem. If new packages are found, the system e-mails us, and other people, and we start upgrading the machines we administer. You can manually check the date-time stamps on the filesets each day and upgrade any newer filesets, or you can ask us to inform you when we get notified.

Of course, if you choose to use yum, the only thing you have to do (after installing yum and its conf file), is to type the following command as root:

  • yum update

Here are the yum.conf that use redhat.lsu.edu for install and updates.

Regardless of the method you use to update your system, remember that anytime a kernel update occurs you should reboot immediately. Practical sense says that rule applies to glibc updates also. If a service is updated (like http or sshd) you should make sure to restart them so that the daemon that is running is the new one.




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