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

[Mezei Zoltan]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 1:22 AM, Eivind Olsen <eivind at aminor.no> wrote:
> 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?")

At our company we handle it as a complex process that includes the
following (short version, the actual document detailing it is way too
long/secret to publish on this list):

- determine the need for and external application/investigate if there
is a supported alternative
- if not, then:
  - check the application's update policy if it exists/check how we
can know if a new version is released (notification e-mail, RSS feed,
have to check manually on the website (we have an automatism for
this), etc.)
  - download the application and depending on the format:
    - rpm --> put it to our own yum repository (which we keep outside
of satellite - it could be inside as well...)
    - source of some format --> if easily doable, create an rpm from
it, if not, compile and handle it as a binary
    - binary --> put it to our own binary repository (which we keep
right next to the yum repository), along with an automatic
installation script and update our small in-house .rpm file that acts
as a wrapper around binary installations
  - install the application
- if a new version of the application comes out we get automatically
notified and the whole process is repeated.

When updating a server, our small wrapper .rpm gets upgraded and in
its %pre and %post scripts we take care of upgrading the binaries. The
non-supported .rpms (custom ones as well as a partial mirror of EPEL)
get updated from the yum repository and the official rpms from
satellite.

Setting up this process the first time is somewhat time consuming and
keeping stuff updated in the custom rpm/binary repository definitely
requires time, but in the end it requires less time than trying to
remember/document all custom software installations. This could be
different if you have more diversity in your environment though so you
should consider introducing this process carefully.
-- 
Zizi

"...nálatok a cégnél múltból nagyon sok van..."