upgrade RHEL 4.3 to RHEL 4.8 to fix CIFS bug - best practice?
 

I need to upgrade 113 servers, not necessarily all at once, running RHEL 4.3 to RHEL 4.8 in order to resolve kernel errors like these:

Mar 23 14:21:59 <hostname> kernel: CIFS VFS: No response buffer
Mar 23 14:21:59 <hostname> kernel: CIFS VFS: Send error in read = -11
Mar 23 14:22:00 <hostname> kernel: CIFS VFS: Send error in read = -9
Mar 22 22:00:07 <hostname> kernel: CIFS VFS: Send error in FindClose = -11

I've read this is fixed in RHEL4.8 and my RHEL4.8 boxes are not experiencing the error.
So I'm curious what people think is the best practice to upgrade RHEL4.3 to RHEL4.8.

I can mount the 4.8 DVD ISO virtually thru ILO and upgrade that way. Time consuming but I have the time... no hurry on this non-crit kernel error.
Or.. WOuld it be easier/better to create a YUM repo with the 4.8 ISO DVD and use YUM to upgrade? Any thoughts on this process would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Jk

If your running RHEL do you have update subscriptions, then all you need to is
up2date -u to update each one

forgot 1 major detail
 

These hosts do not have internet connection.

Seeing as you have so many servers to upgrade I would consider setting up some sort of proxy so you can do it via the up2date method.
yum is not support on RHEL4 (although you can install it I think).
Also I'm assuming there is a number of production systems too, have you contacted Red Hat maybe they have a recommended solution to this problem.

For that many servers, might be worth looking at RH Satellite server; gives total ctrl over repos/rebuilds; no internet reqd. Not sure it if handles RHEL 4.x; it does RHEL 5.x.
You should phone RH and ask.

we use satellite, its great and will manage 4.x and 5.x as well. However its a paid for product and then you have to buy additional management entitlements per servers, so its a faily costly system to setup. But yes its very good and gives you total control.
You could also look at spacewalk which is the open source free version.

I'm currently working on a similar problem. I don't have nearly as many servers to update, but they aren't connected directly to the internet. I just installed yum (needed like 4 dependencies) and createrepo using the rpm command. You can get them from http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/. Then i used createrepo to make the repository, and edited yum.conf to point to the directory where the repo was created. I believe the line is baseurl=file:///path/to/dir whee dir contains the 'repodata' folder that was created by createrepo. Then all you have to do is run 'yum update'.

edit: I did this to upgrade from 4.3 to 4.8 and didn't get any problems. I updated all the packages and then ran 'yum install kernel' after, and modified grub.conf to point to it (yum won't do this automatically). Everything seems to have gone fine..