Linux patching - RHEL help

[Jagadesh_2]

Admins,

We have a RHEL 5 server which was patched nearly an year back. There are patch bundle concepts available in HP-UX and AIX where we can download the last bundle and apply it on the server to make the server compliant.

Is there a way or a script available to analyse the missing patches or download the latest patch bundle from RedHat site?

Any help here will be highly appreciated.

Thanks

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

In RHEL, the patch analysis feature is already built into the package installation tools: if your system is registered with the RedHat Network and has network connectivity to the RHN servers, you can simply run "yum update".

The yum package manager will automatically download a list of patches from RHN, determine the necessary patches, display how much data it needs to download and ask for confirmation. If you answer "yes", then yum will automatically download and install everything required.

If you don't have network connectivity to RHN, you must download the latest RHEL DVD image from RHN (password required). You can burn it into DVD or directly mount the .iso image file. You can use this to upgrade your system to the latest RHEL 5.x level (currently 5.5, I think), but this does not include any security or bugfix patches released after the latest RHEL 5.x update release.

See this RHKB article for instructions (RHN password required):
https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-9744

If you don't have a valid license, you don't get any updates. After all, the RedHat-certified updates are a big part of what you pay for in the RedHat license.

MK