Now that I have my RHEL 5 system on the internet and have registered I see there are some pretty cool commands I can type to see what updates are availble. My questions is two fold:

I see I have many updates to install after typing: yum list updates. What command or site can I go to to find a description of the suggested updates, which are listed after I type yum list updates?

I also have RHEL 5 system that is not on the internet, which I use on a test network. In the event I find that a update is available after using my RHEL system that is on the internet, what commands should I type to "download" the rpm instead of "installing" the rpm? I know if I type yum update or yum install {package-name-1} {package-name-2} this will install the package but instead I would like to download the package so I can update my RHEL 5 system not located on the internet.

A million thanks,
John

Given that you've registered with RHN, look on rhn.redhat.com for the update info. you can see the changelogs there.

updating a rhel5 box that isn't on RHN is not fun. If you don't plan for it to ever be so, I would *REALLY* strongly urge you to convert the system to CentOS, and the same goes for the online RHEL5 box if you're only playing with a 30 day access and don't plan on paying for support.

As there are potentially LOTS of dependencies for updates, the only good way to maintain offline systems is to create an offline repository for yum. you can use tools like mrepo to do this, but it's naturally never fun shifting all these packages around. http://kenfallon.com/how-to-mirror-r...your-firewall/

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The link you referenced appears to explain how to setup an update server so off-line systems can get updates. I'm looking for a way to download updated rpms' (yum list updates) without installing them. Everything I read about apt-get says it will only work with Debian Linux and not RHEL, yes?

The yum command does not offer a "download option" at least not one I can see.

How can one download the rpm, reported after running yum list updates

If you're new to Linux, there's a bit of advice that may help. First, I will assume you read the man page ("man yum" at the command line). At the bottom of a lot of man pages, you'll see a "See Also" section...that has related commands. In this case, you'd see the "yumdownloader" command.

As acid_kewpie said, though, it's not a fun (nor too easy) job keeping things up to date manually like that. And since you're registered, you can always contact Red Hat support for questions about offline repositories, and how to set them up.

there are tools like yumdownloader, but that's only the list for one single system. unless you're going to maintain 100% equality between these two boxes, it just doesn't work like that, hence being able to have an entire mirror and update against it.