After installing a RH7.3 box fresh from the distribution CD, it kept mysteriously crashing all the time. I found that the kernel version it had was 2.4.18-3, and that this was a well known bug with SMP based servers, and that we should upgrade to 2.4.18-4. On the RH support site, it tells you that you can either use an RPM to do this, but admonishes you to first make sure you've applied "all other errata", which I know we haven't. It also gives some instructions on upgrading manually, and, if you're not comfortable with either, to just use up2date. So, bascially my newbie question is this: this is a production server behind a pretty fearsome firewall so I'm not terribly concerned about security. Which is the best way to proceed? I like doing things manually when possible so I know what's going on, and I'm afraid that if I tried to install "all other errata" that it might break something else, and I'm equally afraid that going the up2date/RHN route will simply update a lot of other things that are running stable as is.

Anyone have any experience with this or advice?

updating a stable prog to another stable release shouldnt couse anyproblem cause they are both stable and up2date will simply download and install them if you want you can configure up2date to just download them to a folder for later use like this you can install them manualy and second way is to update is one bye one by downloading them from redhat network site there is part called eratta on the top of the page

Thanks for the words of advice, Nakkaya. I bit the bullet and just gave it a try via up2date on another test system to see how easy/difficult it would be, and it turned out to be fairly painless. I did the same with the production server, and everything seems to be just fine now. It failed a lilo test, but managed to get everything else going ok, so I was able to manually edit the lilo file and get it all happy.

you are welcome