offline update RedHat 9
 

Hi,
Is there a way to download all available RedHat 9 updates and apply them one by one?
Also, I want to keep them all on a CD or on a PC in the network, so when a new RedHat 9 installation is done easily to apply the updates.
(no need to download them again from RedHat web site)

Thank you for your help in advance!

I'd also like to know how to do this. I would like to keep a CD of all the updated RPMs as of today and lock them away. I do not want to depend on up2date or the Red Hat Network.

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

Red Hat sell Proxy and Satellite software for attaching up2date to an on-site repository. Usual caveat that using RHN Enterprise packages on machines without a subscription is bad karma and a breach of terms.

If you are using the discontinued RH9 rather than Enterprise then up2date or RHN won't be of much help. Try something like this -

- Download yum from Fedora Legacy and install it. Keep the .rpm file. Also keep the GPG signature file if you are using Fedora Legacy rpms for updating RH 9.

- Download the updates .rpm files to a directory on the distribution server and share it out via HTTP (with Apache or any other Web server).

- Use the yum-arch command to make the directory of RPMs into a yum repository.

- Make a second yum repo. containing all the original RPMs from the original CDs (just so that you can install anything else you need without the CDs).

- Make a third directory containing the yum .rpm, the GPG signature file and a yum.conf file that points to the repositories you made. Share it out over HTTP with the Web server as well.

- Write a script that installs the yum rpm from your web server (rpm -ivh http://updates.my.lan/yum.....), imports the GPG for Fedora Legacy (rpm --import http://updates.my.lan/yum/GPG...), copies the yum.conf from the server (wget), enables daily yum update checks ('/sbin/chkconfig --level 345 yum on') and then runs 'yum update' immediately.

You can then use the Post install option in kickstart to wget the setup script from your update server and run it once the install is completed so that the box is attached to your update server and automatically updated from it. Have post-install reboot the machine to make sure that everything is in place.

Yum doesn't do CDs, but you can burn a yum repository on to CD and copy it whereever you want.

If you'd like, you can download all the updated RPMs from RedHat's FTP and use the rpm command to upgrade them. Would take a while, though.

Yes. This is Red Hat 9 we are talking about.

I've browsed the Fedora Legacy archives, but how do I know which RPMs to download? And how do I download them without having to click on them one by one in my web browser?

I have used yum to list the packages that need to be updated without actually installing them. Should I use this list to figure out what RPMs/packages to download?

Thanks a lot.

By default, any package fetched by yum is retained in /var/cache/yum/<repository_name>. So if you now run 'yum update' you will update the system itself and have copies of the packages to put in your local repository for updating the other machines on the network.

Alternatively, you can use wget to copy all of the contents of a directory on a Web server to your local machine.