As of the date of this posting, the latest version of Red Hat — and the version being used on all astronet machines — is 5.3, identified by kernel versions >= 2.6.18-128
If for some reason it ever becomes the case that a machine must be upgraded from 5.x to 5.3, Bruce and I ran into some hiccups in yum regarding the updating process.
Ideally, machines can be upgraded to a new RHEL release version simply by
1.) Removing any excluded packages by commenting out any exclude=XXXXX lines in /etc/yum.conf
2.) Running yum -y upgrade
3.) Coming back ~25 mins later and rebooting the machine.
4.) Uncommenting the traditional package excludes so updating can continue automatically as before
Unfortunately, as of this posting the 5.3 version of the tog-pegasus package from RedHat refuses to do an update install – and in fact hangs the update process. All of our machines that were up-and-running when 5.3 was released tried to get this package (because of our automatic update cron job) and the yum process was permanently hung.
The fix:
1.) See if any yum processes are currently being hung up by tog-pegasus
>> ps auxwww | grep -i yum
2.) If there are any yum processes running, and it looks like they’ve been running for a while, they’re probably hung. Reboot to kill the processes.
3.) When you’re back online, check again to see if any yum processes are running and kill (all of) them.
>> ps auxwww | grep -i yum
>> kill -9 <PIDs>
4.) Uninstall the following packages (tog-pegasus and openoffice must be wholly removed)
>> yum erase tog-pegasus openoffice.org-*
5.) Remove any excluded packages by commenting out any exclude=XXXXX lines in /etc/yum.conf
6.) Now try the update again
>> yum -y upgrade
7.) Come back in ~25 mins and make sure everything has completed. When yum tells you it’s done, reboot.
8.) Reinstall openoffice by running the script below or by hand with yum install
>> /etc/secret/clientconfig/install-programs/install-programs.sh
9.) Clear yum’s unfinished-transaction log so it forgets about the whole ordeal and doesn’t bug us about it
>> yum-complete-transaction –cleanup-only
Don’t bother reinstalling tog-pegasus, it’s nothing we will ever need.
**AS OF 2/4/2009 AND TO THE EXTENT OF MY KNOWLEDGE, ALL ASTRONET MACHINES ARE UPGRADED TO RHEL 5.3 AND FUNCTIONING**
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