we are using RHEL 5.6 and our developers said the application was tested / worked in RHEL 5.6.

Normally when we just do "yum update", it will update the minor version to the latest one (5.8) and the kernel to latest one (2.6.18-308*).

How do I keep the minor version (5.6) (like /etc/redhat-release say --- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.6 (Tikanga)) and the kernel version (2.6.18-238*) , and just update the errata patches?

thanks.

Specify the patch you want to install instead of just running "yum update"

For example when I wanted to update Java I ran:
yum update java-1.6.0-sun

You can also specify the architecture (e.g. i386, i586, i686 or x86_64) and version package version if you want to get that specific.

Note that yum by its very nature attempts to bring in dependencies so if you ran a yum update on one package it is very likely it will bring in others. It does tell you what it is going to do so if you see anything in the list you don't want you can tell it not to do the update when it prompts you.

Note that "yum update" only does minor release changes. There is no risk that you'd end up going to RHEL6 if you ran "yum update" on a RHEL5.2 box - just RHEL5.8. The way RedHat does things is they keep the same upstream package version (e.g. BIND 9.3 on RHEL5) and backport security and bug fixes (and some enhancements) into it so their version is not exactly the same as the upstream. Typically this means running "yum update" doesn't break anything.

On occasion though things are screwed up as for example when RHEL decided to change the way they did Java. We had need to run multiple versions (1.4.2. 1.5 and 6] on a server and in one of their updates they changed the way things worked and essentially blew away the versions lower than 6 and changed the location of 6. However, in that case we were running a yum update just on Java rather than full yum update and had the issue. As noted that isn't normal and it's the only example I can think of that broke it.

Although as I typed that - I don't think RHEL5.8 has Xen any longer - it has KVM so if you're doing Xen virtualization you'd need to check on that.

MensaWater,

Thanks for your reply. It's very tedicious to aplly patch by patch individually.
Is there any way to apply the whole errata patches for certain minor version one time, let's say RHEL5.6?

Thanks.

Most likely going to have to use z-stream (charged perk by redhat). If you have access to RHN your set. https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/solutions/22742 Summary is you make a repo out of the dvd iso which has the latest upstream fixes to your update release and then upgrade off that repo.

Another way if you don't not having the latest z-stream eratta and just doing point in time the update was released -- is if you have RH Satellite you kickstart a system at that specific update level.. then just sync package profiles between the two servers. Not sure if you could make a custom channel based on the packages of a certain server might be a 3rd way of doing it.

I've never had this need normally most vendors if they support 5.x they support all the way to x.9. But I could see your need; we had a few products (I'll not mention their vendor name here) wouldn't let us go past 4.6 or 4.7 forget which because of a NFS concern in the new code. Anyways off-topic...

Good luck.