Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Creating a local RPM site for Isolated Red Hat Servers - Part II

In my previous post, I discussed one option of downloading, but NOT installing, required and marked packages for a RedHat Server. In the first Part, I included a script that would create a directory and download the rpm files to this directory specifically. I had tested this script on an RHEL 5.5 machine.

This post is continuation of the Part I and makes the assumption that the reader now has, in at least some fashion, downloaded the rpm files that are needed to patch a system that can't (or doesn't) touch the internet. This system is assumed to be mirrored by the system that we used to download patches. So....

Using the script from Part I, and today's date, we should have a folder /vpmt/updates/2011_01_04/ that contains all of the currently needed rpm files. What are we supposed to do with these files, other than just stare at them?

I am so glad you asked, and I hope that you are prepared for a long, LONG, drawn out answer. Please understand that there is a LOT of work required in updating an offline system from patches downloaded to a mirrored online system. So...

1. Copy the files to a disk
2. Copy the files from the disk to the offline system
3. Open a terminal window and navigate to the folder where you copied the rpm files to in step 2
4. Execute (as root, or with su) chmod 755 *.rpm
5. Execute (as root, or with su) rpm -Uvh *.rpm from the directory where the files were copied


...and those five steps, ALL five long and tedious steps, are all that should be required to install the patches that you downloaded on the first system. Now, I know what you are thinking: "What about all the dependencies that are bound to be present?" This is where the way rpm works and its options come into play.

More to follow about RPM.

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