Hi all,
I have 2 servers that have RHEL 3 ES on them, both with the same config. I used up2date to download and patch one of the systems and kept the rpms to install on the other one. I guess my question is, can I get up2date to look in that directory and patch the other server or is there a better method that would be as safe? These are critical servers and I can't really take a chance on doing something like "rpm -Uvh *.rpm" and end up messing up the install. Any thoughts?

I don't know of a way to make it use anything as the up2date source other than RH's site.

What you can do is copy *.rpm and *.hdr from /var/spool/up2date of the server you patched with up2date to your other one. You can then do the rpm install of the items that were installed to keep your servers in sync.

rpm -qa will show you everything you have installed (not everything in the up2date directory is) on the first server. You can then run rpm commands to install those packages on the second server.

Actually, I downloaded the rpms to an NFS mount that both systems can see. I was able to avoid re-download by just pointing up2date to that mount. Because of the high memory useage on the server (maxed mem useage), download bandwidth is slow and would take forever to download over 600 megs of stuff. up2date just skips the packages it sees as already downloaded, making the patching process much faster than it would be.

Deviathan, I am in a similar situation and I think your solution would meet my needs.

How exactly do you point up2date to a central NFS mount-point?

Also, did I infer correctly that all of the updates that have been applied to my system can be found in /var/spool/up2date? I ask because I believe there were dozens of updates that have been installed over the course of running up2date, however, the following is all I see in my /var/spool/up2date directory...

Thanks,
Mike



# pwd
/var/spool/up2date
# ll
total 1368
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 37480 Nov 2 16:22 ethereal-0.99.0-EL4.2.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13964 Nov 2 16:22 ethereal-gnome-0.99.0-EL4.2.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 74748 Nov 2 16:25 mozilla-1.7.13-1.4.1.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12132 Nov 2 16:25 mozilla-chat-1.7.13-1.4.1.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 368328 Nov 2 16:25 mozilla-devel-1.7.13-1.4.1.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13920 Nov 2 16:25 mozilla-dom-inspector-1.7.13-1.4.1.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12124 Nov 2 16:25 mozilla-js-debugger-1.7.13-1.4.1.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 20292 Nov 2 16:25 mozilla-mail-1.7.13-1.4.1.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12296 Nov 2 16:25 mozilla-nspr-1.7.13-1.4.1.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21208 Nov 2 16:25 mozilla-nspr-devel-1.7.13-1.4.1.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13788 Nov 2 16:25 mozilla-nss-1.7.13-1.4.1.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32452 Nov 2 16:25 mozilla-nss-devel-1.7.13-1.4.1.i386.hdr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 502575 Nov 29 11:38 rhel-i386-es-4.20061124093204
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 224735 Nov 29 11:38 rhel-i386-es-4-obsoletes.20061124093204
#

The usual path for download is /var/spool/up2date. You should be able to export this as an nfs mount on the server used for downloads. Then use the same path as a mount point on the other server. You will also need to configure up2date on your download server to keep the binary packages after installation. This is done with up2date-configure.

There are other possible options such as adding the directory to the local directory section of /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources file. There is also a -k command line option that allows you to specify a colon separated list of directories to look in before downloading. The nfs mount sounds the easiest to me.

Bill

Since my post of a few months ago I found you can point up2date to a local repository rather than RedHat's servers.

/var/spool/up2date is where it would save the information but that is configurable as well. Also it would only store those things you loaded via up2date. If you had downloaded an rpm manually from somewhere or compiled a source yourself it wouldn't be reflected in /var/spool/up2date. Typically I save such packages in a directory I'd created for that called /root/Packages. In there I also have a readme that I update which explains the purpose of the package and why it was gotten that way rather than via up2date.