new RHEL 4 machine

John Abreau john.abreau at zuken.com
Tue Aug 15 13:56:12 EDT 2006


Malloy, John wrote:
> What about updating the system?

If you want to use up2date, you need to purchase a license from Redhat.
There are a couple other options if this is a production machine that
you're unable to reinstall. If you can reinstall, and you absolutely
don't want to purchase a license, you're better off installing
CentOS, which is essentially the same thing as RHEL; CentOS is a
recompilation of the RHEL sources, and actively tracks all RHEL updates.

CentOS uses "yum" for updating, and I imagine it would be possible
to maek RHEL work with yum, though it would probably be a lot of effort;
reinstalling with CentOS would likely be much easier.

Another option is to mirror all the RHEL updates on a regular basis, and
then rum "rpm -F *.rpm" in the mirror directory whenever there are
new updates. The "-F" tels rpm to "freshen" the installed packages,
and will only update packages that are already installed. If
dependencies changed in the newer version of a package, the "rpm -F"
might fail, and then you'd have to install the missing dependencies
before trying the "rpm -F" again.

Ultimately, your best bet is to reinstall with CentOS if you can.


-- 
John Abreau
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