I just reinstalled RH9 and I dont want to connect to the internet until i have made sure things are as secure as they can be but i do need to get all the updates from REDHAT, like the kernel, and patches for other stuff especially the security updates. What do you all think would be the most secure way of patching without logging on and downloading everything, I could burn everything to disk from my windows system but that would take forever trying to figure out what i need. any advice would be appreciated. thanks

Download and install whatever you use on your machine, such as the services your using. If your using apache, download and install apache. If you use ssh to remote login, download the latest and install it.
Depending on what's easiest and how much you need to update depends of if you need to use a cdr or floppy, or any other type of media.

But this type of question, well, we can't give you an exact answer in what to download and install, as we don't know what your going to be using your machine for, etc.

This should make it easy.

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh9-errata-security.html

I. Make sure any network services in your runlevel are stopped.
Use "chkconfig --list" to list them. Also check Xinetd is stopped.
After stopping, check with "netstat -an" or "lsof -i" for any in the listening state.
II. Edit your firewall script to only allow traffic between you and your ISP's DNS and RHN. For the RHN rules you could use these ranges: 216.148.218.0/24 66.187.232.0/24, protocol TCP, port 443.
Or, if you have a decent connection (or lotsa time), have sufficient diskspace, and if you can find a local RH mirror use that instead of your initial RHN update. Add the ftp address to your rules.
Would be good to get RH's GPG sig tho for verifying.

Make sure your up2date is current, else login to your RHN account and fetch the latest rpm with the new certificate.
If you haven't installed Aide yet, generate a md5sum list of files on the system: "find / -path /proc -prune -o -type f -xdev | xargs -ix md5sum "x" 2>&1>/tmp/md5sums".

Now get the updates for your system.
Rpm will start some services after updating, so make sure they're either stopped, or disconnect your box from the network.
After updating, and before you connect the box back to the net, if you didn't install Aide yet, generate a new, separate, md5sum list.

Don't play with your box until you set up the most basic security measures, you know what I mean :-]

Well the box is behind a network correct? Block all traffic (all ports) to that box. OR...download all the stuff you NEED (aka services you actually run..otherwise you shouldn't be installing them in the first place). Copy then over to your linux box (or burn on CD and move over) and rpm -Rvh *.rpm

Thanks everyone for the help