[rhelv6-list] How do people keep track of third party software?

[Eivind Olsen]

Hello.

I'm wondering how people recommend to keep track of / making sure third party software is kept up to date. Let's say you have >10 servers running RHEL6, and you have to install some third party RPMs on some of these servers as well as upgrading it every now and then (Oracle Java? vmware tools? Other software that doesn't have any official repository...).

How do you keep yourself on top of this? Do you set up your own repository with those RPMs and add a yum repo file on the servers so it will show up when you do a "yum update"? Do you install the RPM manually and hope you will remember about it? Do you import it into your Satellite server and add it to your channels? Recipe in Puppet? Or some other way? What works for you?

(my question isn't "How do I know that a new version of Java has been released?")


Regards
Eivind Olsen