yum update best practices

[Jason Edgecombe]

Doug Weimer wrote:
> On Sat, 08 Mar 2008, Jason Edgecombe wrote:
>
>   
>> I'm currently using cfengine on RHEL5 with a nightly yum update for two 
>> machine configs for a total of 40 machines. I use a private yum repo 
>> that I manually sync with upstream after some testing. I would recommend 
>> excluding the kernel updates and having those be triggered manually or 
>> explicitly using cfengine. So far, I'm manually triggering kernel 
>> updates. I use openafs and vmware-server so I have some kernel-dependent 
>> rpms that must be kept on sync. My biggest problem is that I need to 
>> move to some way of locking some machines to certain versions of rpms. 
>> That would make it easier to roll out updates to my workstations before 
>> I push the updates to the servers.
>>     
>
> Take a look at the cfengine packages action. It has rpm support and
> allows you to match against specific package versions.
>
> http://www.cfengine.org/docs/cfengine-Reference.html#packages
>
> It's not extremely fast when testing hundreds of packages, so you may
> still want to restrict the version checks to non-interactive or nightly runs.
>   
Thanks Doug,

I played with the cfengine packages stuff a little, but I did find the 
slowness that you mentioned.
I like the yum update method and using cfengine packages doesn't mesh 
well with yum update. I think that versioned repositories are more what 
I need. maybe just have a symlink farms for each yum repository version.

Jason