RE: Installing update 4 for RHEL ES 3

Daniel Lyttle:
> 		I currently have RHEL ES 3 with updates 3 and I 
> need to install update 4 only as the software has only been 
> tested with  update 4...

Jon Stanley:
> To be a little more specific, you can download the ISO's, and 
> then copy the RedHat/RPMS directory somewhere, and run an rpm 
> -Fvh against all of those RPM's.  It will only update those 
> RPM's that are currently installed...

The make-your-own-yum-repository option described elsewhere
in this thread sounds intriguing; I might try that.  In the
past when I've used Jon's "rpm -Fvh" option with good results,
there are the following points I'd augment his advice with.

Obviously, you don't have to burn the ISO images to CD's, you
can pull out the RPM files via a loopback mounts:

   for f in 1 2 3 4; do
     mkdir $f
     sudo mount -t iso9660 -r -o loop rhel-3-u4-i386-?s-disc$f.iso $f
   done
   for d in ?/RedHat/RPMS; do 
      pushd $d
      cp -a *.rpm /some/where/handy
      popd
   done

If I'm fiddling with multiple machines, I usually like to keep the
original RPM files around, so I make a link directory to do updates
from:

   cd /some/where/handy
   mkdir ../foo; ln *.rpm ../foo
   cd ../foo

Typically during an update RedHat may have changed rpm, up2date, and
dependency information about the packages.  So just running "rpm -Fvh *"
doesn't work out well for me.  What has is:

1) take care of the rpm stuff first
   rpm -Uvh rpm*rpm
   rm rpm*rpm

2) handle kernels separately, since you want "rpm -i", not "rpm -F"
on those.  I like to keep old kernels for about a month before
removing them, in case I run into stability or boot problems with
the new ones.  So next you install any kernel ancillary packages,
plus your appropriate new kernel:

   ls kern*
   rpm -Fvh kernel-util* ...  # do the non-kernel rpm's
   rpm -ivh kernel-smp-2.4.21-*.EL.i686.rpm  # or whatever
   rm kern*

3) Now you can pretty safely do Jon's
   rpm -Fvh *rpm

and have good odds that it will work.  You may run into some
dependency issues; a few rounds of either
   rpm -e
or
   rpm -Uvh
on the offending packages will generally straighten those out.
Also, a few packages such as glibc and openssl tend to come
in architecture specific versions, such as i386, i686, or athlon.
rpm will generally pick the best one for your system, but you
are likely to get warnings about "adding" packages which you
already selected again as it stumbles across the different
variants.  It's pretty safe to ignore those warnings.

This doesn't address this issue of what to do with post-U4 but
pre-U5 updates, or how to safely run an update 4 system without
the subsequent security patches, but that's not the immediate
issue.

-- Jim Leinweber
State Laboratory of Hygiene, University of Wisconsin - Madison
<jiml-qDHGe9P1N6L2fBVCVOL8/[email protected]> 2811 Agriculture DR; phone +1 608 221 6281
PGP fp: 2E36 47BC DB03 57CE 86AD  19CC 41A1 9179   5C6B C8B9




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