Hi,

I have a RedHat 5.1 x86_64 iso image which we're going to use to kickstart 100+ servers. As these 100 servers are to be built over a couple of months, I don't want to run a Post-Kickstart 'yum update' as this will leave servers on different RPM versions.

What I'd like to do is update the ISO with all the latest RPM's, and then roll this out as the source of my kickstart's.

Has anyone any experience with this or can you suggest an alternative method?

Many Thanks,

Stuart.

Why don't you download the relevant rpms to a server, and create a repo on that server, and do a yum update from your own server? That way you'll have control of all versioning.

Look into createrepo for repo creation

BillyMayDay, thanks for your options. I tried the createrepo option and either I'm too thick to understand it (probably) or I had something missing in the install but couldn't get it to work.

What I did to get it working is:

Built a client from my (out of date) iso image.
install the yum-readonly package
Run a 'yum update --readonly', this downloads the packages from RHN but doesn't install them, just stores them in the /var/cache/yum/<distro>/packages directory.
I put the new packages onto an NFS Server (I.e. not the client).
Altered %post to mount the NFS area to /mnt, and to Run 'rpm -U /mnt/*' then umount /mnt

When the host rebooted I registered the client and 'yum update all' returned no packages!

Whole Kickstart took about 30 minutes, which is great!