Best way to keep the system up to date

J

jlixfeld

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Jun 1, 2009
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What's the best way to keep the system up to date? I recently got a message from my install saying that there were a few updates available for my system. yum check-update also shows that there are heaps of updates available.

I assume it's a 'very bad idea' (tm) to blindly perform a yum -y upgrade on my system to get all my RPMs up to date for risk of an RPM update mangling the a version of same application as what DA installs, so what's the general practise? Install the available system updates and leave the rest alone?
 
You mean that I can just run yum update without any problem?

How do I have to set the exclude list? Can I update the kernel?

exclude=kernel* apache* httpd* php* mod_* mysql* MySQL* da_* *ftp* exim* sendmail* named*

Thanks
Marco
 
You should be able to update the kernel; the issues are:

Updating the kernel doesn't reboot the server, so the new kernel is just sitting there not doing anything until you reboot the server.

And ...

While an updated kernel should be safe if a previous kernel from the same source works, there's always a possibility a new kernel won't work, possibly because your server uses or requires a kernel module not compatible with the new kernel.

If the new kernel doesn't work you'll probably need onsite access to your server to revert to the old kernel and you'll certainly need to know how to do it (so do your research well in advance). For these reasons, we generally manually update the kernel when we're onsite.

Jeff
 
Yes you have to use that to keep the stuff custombuild installs updated...
 
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