Howdy All,
Have two DNS RH 7.3 servers running BIND 9.2.0 that I have been told I need to update to BIND 9.2.3 for security patches. Have bind-9.2.3.tag.gz file. How do I go about doing this upgrade? I come from the Novell world where you either run NWCONFIG or unload xxxx - copy new NLMs - reload xxxx to update and am a tad confused as I am a bit new to Linux. Basicly want to make sure when updating that I don't trash our existing DNS config. That would be bad. Any help appricated!
John Humphrey

.tar.gz is probably a source tarball you have to compile yourself. In this case, you will probably end up having both bind versions or something similar.
To keep your RH installation consistent, you should use Red Hat rpm packages.
Get Red Hat security patches automagically by using up2date or look at www.redhat.com/errata
If there is no update for bind available, there are two possibilities:

- Red Hat has patched their stock version of bind with the fixes already
- Red Hat has no fix available (should not happen)

To get newer versions, you can also look at www.rpmfind.net


Addendum (few minutes later ... ;-)

I oversaw that you are using RH 7.3 which is no longer supported.
In fact, none of the "normal" Red Hat Version are, except RH9, which expires in March.

Try to get a bind rpm elsewhere (e.g. as I said on rpmfind).

You should consider upgrading to either Fedora or Red Hats (expensive) "high end" products - or switch to Debian (which is what I did)

Thanks for the quick reply! OK, found bind-9.2.1-1.7x.2.i386.rpm on rpmfind.com for RH 7.3. At this point I kill named 9.2.0 -> run rpm -Uvv bind-9.2.1-1.7x.2.i386.rpm and then restart named, correct?

Addendum (a few minutes later also... :-)
Yea, we are aware of RH 7.3 and actually are looking at RH Enterprise. Actually with Novell picking up a Linux distro, since we are a Novell shop may just go with whatever package they offer, when they offer it as I am sure (at least I think) they will as a seperate product. Thanks for the pointer though!

It's rpm -Uvh or better rpm -Fvh
The -F option updates only existing packages, -U updates existing and installs (!) all other packages you listed. In your case the result will be the same.
Also stopping and restarting should be done by the rpm (However it's a good idea to restart after install).
And do a restart not by killing the processes (yes, it works) - use the init script:

/etc/init.d/bind restart

(Just a questiong of good taste, IMHO ;-)


If you are a Novell Shop, you will probably go with Suse. Have a lot of fun ...