RH Patching best practice and Management Method

[Dary]

Hi all,

I have about 10 servers running RH AS 4.x. Here are my questions;

1) What is the best way/method to setup a patching scheme?

2) Dose it cost me to Setup RHN Satellite? how much?

3) What is proxy? and difference between proxy and Satellite setup?

4) What is the added value or advantages to purchase RHN entitlement through HP?

5) What is the best practice in my case?

Please send me any doc in-regards to above questions.

I thank you for any help.

Dary.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Dary,

Due to security issues, patching must be done frequently, especially if there is any exposure to the Public Internet, even browsing.

I would suggest a few alternatives.

1) With 1 RHN license, you can set up a yum respository inside your network. Download the patches to the server using up2date, have settings to save all the rpms, which will be copied to the yum server.

2) Patchlink, permits you to fine tune what patches to use andn ot use.

3) Answer to question 4. HP support which substantially outshines RH support.

SEP

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

1) What is the best way/method to setup a patching scheme?

IMHO, in your situation up2date working against RHN will do it work.

BTW, AFAIK SEP solution (10 computers using 1 RHN subscription) isn't legal.


2) Dose it cost me to Setup RHN Satellite? how much?

It's very expensive

3) What is proxy? and difference between proxy and Satellite setup?

see http://www.redhat.com/rhn/ for details.
IMHO, you don't need RHN proxy

[Alan_152]

Any best practice patching scheme should start with (1) documention of the setup prior to patching, (2) a full backup prior to patching, (3) manual patching, (4) testing of the patch in a simulated production environment prior to general release, and (5) a rollback change control plan.

Yes, this involves a lot more work than simply automating the whole thing, but it can save you a lot of headaches in the long run.