[thelist] How to keep yum from killing my box with autoupdate

Garrick S. Bodine (Shan) gsb at athenswebdevelopment.com
Mon Feb 28 12:34:26 CST 2005


Ouch. 

This sounds a bit OT for thelist, but quickly:

1. Don't use autoupdates on production servers. Keep your eyes on
Security Focus and your vendor update lists. If you're using Fedora, you
can use the rhnsd system to notify you of security updates as well. Do
them (when possible, of course) at off-times and backup your
configurations. 

2. Don't use unofficial repositories for production servers and don't
turn off the checksumming features--just import the keys.

Without more details and errors, it's impossible to know what is going
on exactly, but those seem to cover most of the things that cause the
situations you're in. You should check the messageboards and support
forums for your distro or you can email me offlist for more specifics--
especially if it's Fedora Core.

On a related note, if it is Fedora, I'm not sure that you shouldn't pick
a slightly less bleeding edge distro for production equipment. It may
save you in the long run, since FC changes so rapidly compared to system
administrators' projected upgrade schedules.

HTH,
gsb

On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 10:02 -0800, Jonathan Dillon wrote:
> Hey all:
> 
> Last night Yum killed one of our production servers.  Apparently, it updated
> to a new version of apache (chkconfig yum on was set) and didn't update the
> ssl dependencies.  This made it so the httpd.conf file was invalid, and
> won't restart.
> 
> Now the box won't start, and I'm kind of out of ideas.  I'm going to have to
> struggle through to see if I can get the packages happy again.
> 
> Anyone know how to avoid this?  This is lame. ;-)
> 
> Jonathan
> 



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