Hi,

I'm running Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a server, and I'm using yum to apply upgrades.

I want to apply all patches to one server, let's call it TEST. A few weeks will elapse and I'll begin to feel confident that the patches interfere with anything else on the server. When I'm ready, I want to apply exactly the same patches to another server, let's call it LIVE.

What is a good way of capturing all patches applied to TEST, then applying the the exact same patches to LIVE later, with absolutely no new surprises in there?

Thanks :-)

It's probably not the most efficient way to do things, but I'd run yum --downloadonly on TEST, apply the patches, and put the downloaded files aside. Once I've established that everything's ok, I'd install those same files on LIVE.

Hi,

Thanks for the advice RockDoctor, I'll give that a whirl and let you know how I get on with that approach.

Thanks again :-)

You can read /var/log/yum.log on TEST server for list of updated packages and versions.
Then use this info for update to exact version of RPM on LIVE.

Here are the instructions I received from Redhat to set up a yum server for my Production servers not connected to the RedHat portal, hope this helps:

To set it up as a local yum repository in RHEL5:
https://access.redhat.com/site/solutions/328843


To update a small number of packages on a disconnected system that has packages installed that match a live system, it may be most straight forward to instruct the live system to keep updated packages which you can then transfer to the disconnected system:

Edit /etc/yum.conf and change the 'keepcache' parameter from 0 to 1:

keepcache=1

Downloaded packages will be found in the /var/cache/yum/*/packages directory.

Once they are transferred to the disconnected machine, you can use yum localinstall to install them:

# yum localinstall *.rpm


To clear downloaded packages and other cache information on the live system, use yum clear all:

# yum clear all