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Keeping Red Hat Systems Up To Date

This has effectively been deprecated. This page is broadly kept for historical interest!

Synopsis

# rpmalert -h
Usage:
        rpmalert -h
        rpmalert [ -s ] [ -u ] <upgrade directory>

        -h: help --- this message
        -s: suppress column headers
        -u: attempt upgrade

Worked example

First we need access to the Red Hat packages and updates. In this example we will mount the Unix Support Red Hat mirror to do this. Note the corresponding unmount at the end of the example.

# mount -o ro nfs-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk:/linux/redhat /mnt

Next we find out what packages we need to upgrade on the system, both Intel packages and architecture-neutral packages.

# rpmalert /mnt/updates/6.2/i386
NAME                          CURRENT             UPGRADE
====                          =======             =======             
e2fsprogs                     1.15-3              1.17-1
glib                          1.2.5-1             1.2.6-2
groff                         1.11a-9             1.15-1
initscripts                   4.48-1              4.70-1
linuxconf                     1.16r3.2-2          1.16r10-2
pam                           0.68-7              0.68-10
sysklogd                      1.3.31-12           1.3.31-14

# rpmalert /mnt/updates/6.2/noarch
NAME                          CURRENT             UPGRADE
====                          =======             =======

We now know that there are no architecture-neutral upgrades needed so we retstrict attention to the Intel packages and ask rpmalert to upgrade them. A return code of 0 from the upgrade means it was completely successful.

# rpmalert -u /mnt/updates/6.2/i386
NAME                          CURRENT             UPGRADE             
====                          =======             =======             
e2fsprogs                     1.15-3              1.17-1              
glib                          1.2.5-1             1.2.6-2             
groff                         1.11a-9             1.15-1              
initscripts                   4.48-1              4.70-1              
linuxconf                     1.16r3.2-2          1.16r10-2           
pam                           0.68-7              0.68-10             
sysklogd                      1.3.31-12           1.3.31-14           
About to run:
rpm --upgrade e2fsprogs-1.17-1.i386.rpm glib-1.2.6-2.i386.rpm
 groff-1.15-1.i386.rpm initscripts-4.70-1.i386.rpm linuxconf-1.16r10-2.i386.rpm
 pam-0.68-10.i386.rpm sysklogd-1.3.31-14.i386.rpm
Upgrade return code: 0

Finally, if we had to mount a copy of the Red Hat mirror onto /mnt then we should unmount it again afterwards. Note that the command is umount and not unmount.

# umount /mnt

Last updated by bjh21 on 2000-12-06.