RHEL 3 questions

[Brendan Murphy_5]

Hi
I was hoping someone might help me with a few questions for a customer. They run RHEL 3 AS on a number of proliant servers, booting locally from smartarrays & using SAN storage for data & application software. Recently they upgraded their test environment from update 5 to update 7 to correct an issue they were experiencing with SAN connectivity when running DataProtector backups. Anyway, the HP recommended update didn't cure the problem. HP now recommend update 8. In order to exactly simulate the production environment they insist that update 7 be rolled back to the original update 5. This would be OK if they hadn't cleared down the only clean backup. The system is on a private network with NO external access granted whatsoever, so the system was manually updated using a DVD & pointing to the DVD as the up2date repository. Also up2date was setup to enable rollbacks. I'm now being told that even though up2date was set to allow rollbacks, RHEL3 does not support rollbacks from U7 to U5. Is this true? Does anyone know of a possible way out for me here??

My other question relates in part to the above query ... if upgrading from update 5 to update 8, should this be done incrementally? I don't believe so myself .. I'd just like the re-assurance RHEL update packages are culumlative .. what gets delivered in U6 will also be delivered in U8. The customer says they have been in direct contact with RedHat & they have informed them that in order to go from RHEL 3 U5, upto U8, they need to apply the intermediate updates U6 & U7. I'm gobsmacked if this is the case!!! ... in other words my customer wants to be 100% certain that if they can't roll-back from u7 to u5, that a system going from u5 -> u7 -> u8 will be identical to a system going from u5 -> u8.

Are there any Best Practise recommendations to allow for rapid rollback of updates in compliance with RedHat support?? Do they have to poke a hole through their network & set up a satellite server?

Thanks for any help provided

Regards

Brendan

[Alan Hatch]

Bendan,

This is from the Red Hat network web page that links the various update versions for RHEL3

"Note: If you are downloading Red Hat Enterprise Linux ISOs, please be aware that each update release is a complete, functional version of the operating system and does not require previous releases. If you would like the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you only need to download the ISOs for the latest update release."

Hope that is useful.

Alan

[David B. P.]

"RHEL3 does not support rollbacks from U7 to U5. Is this true?"

I'm not sure but I think it's true.

"should this be done incrementally?"

It's not necessary. You will get the same results upgrading from an update 3 or from an update7. If you want the latest version you can run from your current system the command "up2date -uf" and your system will be automatically updated to the latest update version (-f option is necessary to force the kernel update).