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 | Fedora at LSU - updates |
Fedora at LSU provides a local mirror of updates for all the versions of Fedora. These updates are obtained by rsyncing with multiple Official Fedora Mirror sites. Newer versions are rsynced every two hours.
To find the updates on our mirror, select the Fedora version you are interested in from the menu on the left and then choose updates. You will find a series of directories here that group the updates by architecture (i386, i586, i686, athlon, noarch). You can determine the architecture of an installed RPM on your system by typing: rpm --queryformat '%{name} %{arch}\n' -q <package name>
In the past, we have operated a current server. Current is an open source server that works with Fedora's up2date client that was originally developed at Duke University. Current is/was a wonderful product. Unfortunately, development appears to have stalled (Lead resigned early February 2004 and has not been replaced). Current does not have a version that works on our server. For this reason, we will not run the current server in the future.
Instead, we support yum. yum that was also developed at Duke University. Our Fedora releases 7.0 and newer have the necessary headers generated to support yum. Clients exist for Fedora 7.3 and beyond (the 7.3 client should work backwards to 7.0). Please visit yum for more info about yum.
You can keep your Fedora system updated, with current versions and security patches, by refreshing your installed RPMs against this directory. The easiest way to do this is to mount, via NFS, the updates filesystem on your local machine (only allowed across LSU network). You'll need to make sure your NFS services are running:
Now you need somewhere to mount the updates:
This way, if you cd into your /mnt/updates and you see the nfs.not.mounted file, you know that the NFS filesystem isn't mounted yet. To actually mount the filesystem it's easiest to insert a line in the /etc/fstab:
Note that this is one long line and should be entered as such in /etc/fstab.
Then mount the filesystem with:
If you do not add the above entry to your /etc/fstab, you can do a dynamic mount with the following command: You will need to actually mount the updates:
Now that the NFS filesystem is mounted, you can perform your updates. The RedHat Package Manager or RPM provides a way to upgrade already installed packages by using the freshen option: -F. Change into your updates directory ( cd /mnt/updates ) and freshen your RPMs:
In most cases, this will fail the first time! Sometimes this fails because there are two newer versions of a fileset, i.e. fileset-1.2.i386.rpm and fileset-1.3.i386.rpm. Unfortunately, RPM isn't smart enough to figure out which one to upgrade to (newer version of RPM do not usually have this problem). The solution is to upgrade that one fileset by hand:
Eventually, you should be able to get all your installed filesets upgraded (if not, contact Isaac, Brian or Allen and we'll help). For security reasons, you should unmount the NFS upgrade and shutoff all the NFS services on your machine:
Once you get all of your RPMs upgraded, you need to stay upgraded. The Fedora at LSU machine checks for updates several times a day, placing new upgrades in the upgrades NFS filesystem. If new packages are found, the system e-mails us, and other people, and we start upgrading the machines we administer. You can manually check the date-time stamps on the filesets each day and upgrade any newer filesets, or you can ask us to inform you when we get notified.
Of course, if you choose to use yum, the only thing you have to do (after installing yum and its conf file), is to type the following command as root:
Here are the yum.conf that use fedora.lsu.edu for install and updates.
NOTE: You must execute the following command before yum will be able to apply updates on Fedora Core 3:
rpm --import /usr/share/rhn/RPM-GPG-KEY
Regardless of the method you use to update your system, remember that anytime a kernel update occurs you should reboot immediately. Practical sense says that rule applies to glibc updates also. If a service is updated (like http or sshd) you should make sure to restart them so that the daemon that is running is the new one.
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