Hello LinuxQuestions, first let me thank you for being a great resource for me.

What I need help with: I am attempting to match two servers exactly in terms of which packages are installed. These are used for testing and for that reason need to be identical (package-wise.)

They're both Red Hat 5 servers running the same kernel. There are 257 differences in packages between the two of them.

What's the best way to get these two to match?

Thank you so much.

- Scott

You will more than likely not be able to do an exact match of the package revisions installed. I cut-over servers commonly for my job, it requires some reconfig in some cases but in most cases the same package with a different revision number will work just fine.

Best answer is to install the packages that your server requires, even if the version numbers don't match, and then test your applications.

Thanks Kustom,

I would agree with you personally, unfortunately our Oracle DBA is a bit more stringent about what he's willing to tolerate.

But if I end up with no other options, I may end up having to tell him that. (Or manually trying to find these packages.)

Thanks again.

I tell my oracle dba's that all the time. The biggest pacakges they are concerned with are the oracle asm lib packages which can be downloaded from Oracle's site at: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/to...ex-101839.html

Are there any other packages they are concerned with?

I feel your pain in dealing with the DBA's I had to stay up till 2 AM a couple weeks ago helping my guys do a cut-over. Ugh.

1. if its 2 test systems, use eg this method https://code.google.com/p/iredmail/w...Yum_Repository and point both systems to it.
2. if one system is already in prodn, has it got RAID1 hot disk swap capability?
We're using that where I work on HP-DL380 G5 & similar boxes; just brilliant for this.

Note that to be identical(!) pkgs, they must be identical HW as well.

recently i also had requirement of clone one server exactly same as running server for testing ...for that i copied full server in another hdd .now it is clone of server.so you can also do the same thing. My suggestion is for you to copy full server , check space capacity, to another hdd of higher or same capacity......

you did not need to give stress on mind just make a duplicate of server.don't care about packages , oracle etc...just create a duplicate ...thats it.

Don't do a duplicate copy as centos123 said. Hardware will be different and I would bet my bottom dollar it kernel panics. Same thing with a raid hot swap on the drive. I work for a fortune 500 company, my primary responsibility is refreshing servers in a production DC and all of the methods above have been attempted and failed unless it is the EXACT same hardware.

If you do it the right way, you would be setting up channels with your packages in satellite for your different rhel versions and then when you do a cut-over you simply assign it to the, for example, RHEL 5.7 Oracle DB supplementary channel and just do a yum upgrade -y on the server. Boom your server now has all the correct packages, do a few rsync's and have your oracle guys do their install and you are cut-over to a new machine.

Thanks guys for all the advice. I went with what Kustom said, for the most part. Luckily all of our servers are virtualized on VMware, so making a clone of the server is no big deal at all. But just for completion's sake, I actually did convince them that most of these packages are similar to the point of no difference and updated the more important ones to the same version.

I appreciate the help. It looks like this one is resolved.

You can mark the thread as "SOLVED" from the "Thread Tools" drop down on the top of the page.

what kustom42 said is also correct...making duplicate of server is possible only when we had same configuration machine.i had same configuration machine so i faced no issue on duplicate server regarding kernel also...its working fine....

so if you have same configuration machine so you can try once...if failed let me also know...
and could you explain me about VMware how you installed and using it . i dont know how to create same machine in machine itself..

well, i used to use vmware before,but now i only use oracle virtualbox,it's better and the most advantage is that virtualbox is all free!