I've got an issue i am trying to figure out and was hoping for some input from anyone out there that might have a clearer head than I do right now.

Here's the deal. My organization has about 100 servers running RHEL 2.1 currently. We need to implement a patching procedure for these boxes. We've got two environments, a test environment and a production. We want to apply any new patches to the test servers first, and let them soak for a week or so, and then apply those same patches to the production servers. The main problem we run into currently is that sometimes, by the end of the soak period, Red Hat has already released a newer package. Which means we'd have to start all over with the soak test, and possibly never make it to the production environment with the newer packages.

I should mention we are using up2date to get stuff from RHN. Basically, if we run up2date on the test servers, in a week (at the end of the soak period) up2date is most likely going to have a different list of available patches, some of which we haven't let soak in our test environment.

Is there anyway around this? It sounds like we need a satellite server to manage which patches are available to our servers. But it would be nice if we could just keep our own repo of all available packages and just make up2date look for them there without ever going out to RHN. Is that possible? Or, i am more than open to any other suggestions. I definately need a solution.

hmm, well i found this: www.nrh-up2date.org

seems like this may be a nice solution. looks like support for RHEL is a bit sketchy though. Any thoughts?

i guess all my posts are too difficult.