Update RHEL 4

[fawrell]

Hi.

We have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 3 with a Oracle 10g database, that was never updated before. We want to update it with up2date, but we dont want to update kernel. And I have some questions.

Does up2date change runlevels of updated services to default? We have deactivated some services and we need to know, that if they will be activated again after update.

Does up2date check space for updates? Or how much space I need for about 358 updates? Im asking this, because I saw one problem, where the up2date hangs due space insufficient and after reboot no services started.

Can I use up2date --undo to rollback updated packages? In man pages is written, that this feature is deprecated and no longer functional. But in GUI configuration page I can still mark Enable RPM Rollbacks. Or is there a way how to uninstall update(s), that cause trouble?

Any other tips, that are good to know before I run update? I have never updated a system before.


Thanks for answers.

[Court Campbell]

My suggestion would be to run up2date -l and redirect it to a file. Then go through the list of updates. Oracle doesn't seem to suggest a full update. I would only update things that have security updates.

I am not sure about up2date changing the rc levels. You might try updating one package to see. I can see that it might since updates aren't patches, but actually new installs.

You'll want to look at /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date for rollback options and packages to skip. by default it should skip kernel*, but you may want to double check.

[dirk dierickx · Accepted solution]

it won't change the runlevels you specified.

even if up2date doesn't support 'rollbacks', you can still do it manual using rpm, but i don't expect you to have any problems with updating your system.

afaik up2date or rpm doesn't check the disk space before starting installation.

[fawrell]

Really thanks for your answers.

Just one more question.

How to 'roolback' using rpm?