Updating Firewall on RH7.2
 

Problem:

I have a firewall with iptables that is on RH7.2 and I need to patch the 2.4 kernel. Is there a way to do this without any downtime?

AFAIK kernel upgrades/patches always require a reboot. With hardware changes about the only thing that does require a reboot on Linux.

You should really consider upgrading your firewall box, as RH is no longer supporting anything before RH9. So you won't be able to get "official" security patches and bugfixes anymore. MIght want to schedule some downtime on off hours and just do a full install instead.

Progeny offers updates for 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0, for a price though.

this is the reason I switched to FreeBSD a few months ago. If you are dedicated to iptables, you could switch to Debian or go crazy and check out any BSD flavor.

Then again if it's only kernel updates you will still be able to get 'em but anything 7.2 specific, forget it. I assume that this is a firewall only so many of the vulnerabilities that are out there shouldn't be running on your system anyway.

Firewall update for RH7.2
 

Thank you all for your comments. My solution is going to be:

Produce a mirror firewall setup on an identical machine lying around;
Swap over machines;
Clean install of RH9;
Update Via RHN;
Copy over IPTable rules to RH9.
Swap back.
Back to normal (hopefully)

Cheers.

Unfortunately support for RH9 ends in April so you'll have to go through the same mess again in a couple of months. You might want to take a look at Fedora if you are thinking about sticking with a Redhat product. It's very similar to Redhat 9 and you can use Yum to automatically keep your patches updated.

Firewall Update
 

I was thinking more along the lines of Debian and APT - but thanks for the tip.