We have adopted a few more red hat enterprise 3/4 servers which require keeping up to date using the up2date program used in red hat servers. I would like to setup a local server containing all the updates for the red hat enterprise 3/4 so that i can update our servers over the network rather than each one of them connecting to Red Hat Network.

I am having difficulty finding documentation on how to do this correctley. I understand that i need to copy RPM's to a physical local server but where do i get the files etc.

Thanks in advance

well redhat's official way to do this is to use a "satellite" server which manages your rhel subscriptions and such without having to give all machiens internet access and such. not cheap though. you might prefer to look at maybe using yum on rhel? http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Packag...ment/YumOnRHEL i'm not too familiar with how up2date really works, but i'd image that if you were to persist using up2date, you can still use it against this base server.

apparently rhel5 is now using yum too, maybe losing up2date altogether according to the link there, so maybe this is a better appraoch anyway.

Yes i have heard they are sticking to YUM in version 5. I was looking into a RHN proxy server i.e. caching the updates for local servers to update from.

Thanks for your help

I didn't respond because I've done a little but am not an expert so wanted to see if anyone else had better ideas. With that caveat here goes:

One thing you can do is use up2date on a single server and use that as your basis for updating the others.
-Make sure your preferences on the single server download but don't install. This will put <package>.hdr and <package>.rpm files in /var/spool/up2date.
-Use a tool like rsync to copy /var/spool/up2date RPMs and Headers to your other servers' /var/spool/up2date (or /var/spoolRPMS or another directory)
-Modify /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources to point to /var/spool/up2date as a local directory.
### A local directory full of packages (a "dir" repo). For example:
#dir my-favorite-rpms /var/spool/RPMS/

I actually did the above once but for some reason can't find the actual entry I'd made in the last step. I suspect I just uncommented the last line and substituted /var/spool/up2date for /var/spool/RPMS. Or maybe I rsync'ed to a different directory (e.g. /var/spool/RPMS) and did up2date using that.

If all else fails you can always do rpm -i on the items you find in /var/spool/up2date.

A couple of notes. The packages names in /var/spool/up2date aren't always exactly what you see when you run rpm -q <package> so sometimes you have to figure out which one you actually installed (e.g. it may download both an i386 and an i686 rpm of the package but the display may not tell you which architecture you installed so you'd have to know which you were on)

There's probably a way to modify sources to use one of your servers as a depot for up2date. The up2date man page may give you more info on that - if so you wouldn't need to do the rsync.