up2date trick

Hello,


I have found the solution to getting errata rpms almost as fast as they
are released to your Current server using up2date. Instead of waiting
for a mirror to mirror them, and hoping it does a good job and is fast
that day.

up2date -uf -d --dbpath=/var/ftp/pub/RedHide/i386/.current/.redhat
--tmpdir=/var/ftp/pub/RedHide/i386/updates/7.2

-uf  to update and force downloading of all errata

-d   to download but not to install the rpms

--dbpath=/path/directory  where directory contains a the files from the
rpmdb-redhat package, which is a copy of a rpm database with ALL the
packages installed

--tmpdir=/path/directory  where directory is the directory you want to
store the rpms for Current


There is currently a pitfall with this idea. As was mentioned on this
list a few days ago a new updates to the up2date and rhn_register
packages. The original version was up2date-2.7.2-7.x.6 for RedHat 7.2.
The first update was up2date-2.7.11-7.x.2. The second update from a few
days ago was update-2.7.46-7.x.2. But their was a glitch in the second
update which caused them to retract that version. So the RedHat up2date
database(Oracle) only knows about the first update. If you happen to
have updated to the second update through up2date before it was
retracted or manually by downloading it from a ftp site, then try to
install up2date-gnome using up2date it will have a version conflict. But
that is not the problem with this trick. Another side effect of this
retraction is that if you are still running the original version of
up2date and try to use up2date to update up2date or all your packages it
will currently get stuck trying to update up2date because of a missing
header file. To work around this you must manually download the second
update to up2date and install them manually. To do this with the fake
database use something like:

rpm -U --justdb --dbpath /var/ftp/pub/RedHide/i386/.current/.redhat
up2date-2.7.11-7.x.2.i386.rpm up2date-gnome-2.7.11-7.x.2.i386.rpm
rhn_register-gnome-2.7.2-7.x.2.i386.rpm
rhn_register-2.7.2-7.x.8.i386.rpm

where

-U to upgrade

--justdb   to update the database but not install the files or run the
scripts, which would be a very bad thing

--dbpath   using the directory where you copied rpmdb-redhat to, also be
sure not to use a = like with up2date


You also may want to clean out your directory with something like:

rm /path/directory/*.hdr /path/directory/redhat-linux-*


I haven't fully tested it, but from what I know of up2date it should
cache the rpms in the download directory, so it shouldn't try download
all the rpms every time you use this trick. Though you will probably
need to clean the directory of the headers each time.

By combining this with Current by using a script(which I have yet to
write) to run cadmin and the above commands every so often through cron
you should have a very up2date, efficient, and reliable Current server.



Step by step for RedHat 7.2 i386:

rpm -i
ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/redhat/7.2/en/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS/rpmdb-redhat-7.2-0.20010924.i386.rpm

cp -a /usr/lib/rpmdb/i386-redhat-linux/redhat /tmp

rpm -U --justdb --dbpath /tmp/redhat
ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/redhat/updates/7.2/en/os/i386/up2date-2.7.11-7.x.2.i386.rpm ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/redhat/updates/7.2/en/os/i386/up2date-gnome-2.7.11-7.x.2.i386.rpm

ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/redhat/updates/7.2/en/os/i386/rhn_register-2.7.2-7.x.8.i386.rpm ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/redhat/updates/7.2/en/os/i386/rhn_register-gnome-2.7.2-7.x.8.i386.rpm


mkdir /tmp/errata

up2date -uf -d --dbpath=/tmp/redhat --tmpdir=/tmp/errata

rm /tmp/errata/*.hdr /tmp/errata/redhat-linux-*