Central Patch Management in Linux

[Amol Choukekar]

Hi,
I have got a farm of Redhat AS 2.1 and ES 3. I am looking for a patch management solution.

The whole idea is to deploy a central server that will get updates from rhn and then these can be pulled by or pushed to production servers after testing.

Please let me know how this can be acheived?

[Steven E. Protter]

up2date will do it.

You can set up one server to do the actual up2date process and set it to save the patches it downloads to a particular location. That install point can be used for other servers to install the rpms.

Just fire up the GUI and configure up2date to save the rpm files. Its best that this location be a nfs or samba export so other systems can get to it.

SEP

[Stuart Browne]

AS is supposed to come with patch-redployment tools.

I don't know what they're called, or how to work them unfortunately (only use ES3), but it's one of the selling points of AS..

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

You have two options:

- to use RH tools - RHN proxy or satellite server

- use Current - free replacement for RHN server, but with limited functionality (http://current.tigris.org/)

Rgds,
Vitaly

[Rodney McKee_1]

Using supported tools, RHN Proxy or satellite. I must say that this is VERY expensive.
Outside this you can use the free version as per Vitaly's comment. This MAY lead to support issues though.
Is there an issue with using RHN to manage the patching. My guess would be band width.
You may be able to use a single system to download the required patches but this system must have ALL packeges installed that are used by ALL the systems. This could get messy if the systems are running a variety of configs.

[dirk dierickx]

Red Carpet from ximian can do such things.
take a look at it here: http://www.ximian.com/products/redcarpet_enterprise/

Red Carpet makes it all very simple, but it is not free. If you want to get your hands dirty you could set up your own apt repository and then use 'apt' on all your systems against your repository.
apt for rpm can be found here: http://apt4rpm.sourceforge.net/

using one of the above you can easily manage patches across a large amount of servers.

[Roberto Polli]

Currentrly RH is supporting -thru Fedora- a tool named
yum
which fits for redhat better than apt (which is debian oriented)

I suggest to take a look at it form the fedora site.

Peace, R/

[Amol Choukekar]

Thanks for the replies. But does yum work on RHAS2.1 and RHES3?

Thanks!
AC