A few days after getting 5.1 out the CentOS team announced yesterday the release of Centos4.6 their updated version of the distribution’s legacy 4.x branch: “The CentOS development team is pleased to announce the release of CentOS 4.6 for i386, x86_64, s390, s390x and ia64. This release corresponds to the upstream vendor 4.6 release. Also released in the updates repository for CentOS 4.6 are all updates through December 15th, 2007. Major changes for this version are: Samba has been updated to version 3.0.25b; Autofs5 is included in this release as a Technology Preview, it resolves several long-standing interoperability issues in multi-vendor environments; there is a technology preview of OpenOffice.org 2.0 included in the updates directory; a new yum included in CentOS 4.6 requires the installation of a metadata parser for yum.” See the complete release announcement for full details.

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Almost one month after RedHat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 (20071107), the CentOS team released yesterday their own 5.1 update for centos5. There are available new iso images for centos5.1 and we can also find a special netinstall iso that can be used to start a remote install. Systems running centos5 will notice the update in the yum/up2date repositories and can be upgraded immediately.

Besides the changes introduced by rhel5.1 you can find the centos particularities here. Personally I have found it quite strange that after the upgrade the /etc/redhat-release file was not showing 5.1 but still CentOS release 5 (Final), even if centos-release-5-1.0.el5.centos.1.i386.rpm was upgraded:
cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS release 5 (Final)
instead of something like “CentOS release 5.1 (Final)“. Apparently this is a known issue and the centos team will create wiki page explaining the situation about that in the next couple of days.

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20070520: If you will run today yum (or up2date) on a Centos 4 system you will notice that there are many updated packages available. This is happening because Centos has released the 5th update of Centos-4 a few days ago and now this update is appearing on Centos mirrors.

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After covering the basics of Yum in my first article, let’s move on to the second part. In this article I’d like to cover some things about keeping your system up to date with Yum on a CentOS 4 system. But these information will also apply with little changes to any other system using Yum like Fedora Core for example.

Let’s begin with a scheduled update of your system: To activate an automatic nightly update, just enter these lines as root:
chkconfig yum on
service yum start


Yum will now check every night for new software versions in your configured Yum repositories and install them. If you didn’t configure any special repositories, at least the normal CentOS update repository is used, so you won’t miss any critical security updates.

But if you configured any 3rd party repositories (like many people do) you should keep the following things in mind: If you add more and more repositories to your Yum configuration, there is a high chance that important system files that were installed from official CentOS repositories (like base and update) are replaced by versions originating from your added 3rd party repositories.
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In this short post I will show you how you can quickly add a range of IPs on any RedHat based system (Rhel, Centos, Fedora, etc). When you have to add many IPs to a system this can be quite handy and save a lot of time.
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As I presented in a previous post the 64bit version of Centos 4.x has some problems with the latest updated kernels that result in up2date failing from functioning with the following error:

up2date -l

Fetching Obsoletes list for channel: centos4-Base...

Fetching Obsoletes list for channel: centos4-Updates...

Fetching Obsoletes list for channel: centos4-extras...

Fetching Obsoletes list for channel: centos4-addons...
An error has occurred:
exceptions.KeyError
See /var/log/up2date for more information

Again in logs we can see that it fails to find the proper architecture for the kernel-smp package:

up2date Could not find an approriate arch for package [['kernel-smp', '2.6.9', '34.0.1.EL', '', 'x86_64', '1000', 'centos4-Updates', 'RPMS/kernel-smp-2.6.9-34.0.1.EL.x86_64.rpm']], skipping

And as in my previous post a quick solution to fix this problem, is to install manually the updated package to fix this problem:
rpm -ivh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/updates/x86_64/RPMS/\
kernel-smp-2.6.9-34.0.1.EL.x86_64.rpm

And, up2date will start working again :-).

If you are using RHEL (any version of Redhat from what I know, but if I am wrong please let me know) Fedora or Centos, you don’t have to do anything special. sudo is installed by default and you will already have it on the system.

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At some point my server runing Centos 4.2 x86-64, started showing the following error when runing up2date:

up2date -l

Fetching Obsoletes list for channel: centos4-Base...
Fetching Obsoletes list for channel: centos4-Updates...
Fetching Obsoletes list for channel: centos4-extras...
Fetching Obsoletes list for channel: centos4-addons...

An error has occurred:
exceptions.KeyError
See /var/log/up2date for more information

This happens only on x86-64 versions of Centos 4 and on normal i386 version this doesn’t happen. This practically stops up2date from functioning.
The up2date program version used: up2date-4.4.67-4.centos4

The error in the logs shows that it fails to find the proper arch for the kernel package:

[Wed Apr 19 03:12:44 2006] up2date Could not find an approriate arch for
package [['kernel-smp', '2.6.9', '34.EL', '', 'x86_64', '1000',
'centos4-Base', 'CentOS/RPMS/kernel-smp-2.6.9-34.EL.x86_64.rpm']], skipping
[Wed Apr 19 03:12:44 2006] up2date The latest version of kernel-smp
was not available for this arch. Skipping
[Wed Apr 19 03:12:44 2006] up2date   File “/usr/sbin/up2date”, line 1265,
in ? sys.exit(main() or 0)…

How to fix this:
If you want to stick with up2date (this doesn’t happen if you are using yum) and don’t want to wait until the Centos team releases a fix for this bug: http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1181, you have the option to manually update the kernel package that keeps up2date from running.
Locate the kernel package that you are using: regular, smp, etc
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/x86_64/CentOS/RPMS/
and download it, for ex kernel-2.6.9-34.EL.x86_64.rpm or kernel-smp-2.6.9-34.EL.x86_64.rpm:

wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/os/x86_64/CentOS/RPMS/
kernel-smp-2.6.9-34.EL.x86_64.rpm

Then just install it manually using rmp:

rpm -ivh kernel-smp-2.6.9-34.EL.x86_64.rpm

After this, run again up2date and as long as the kernel upgrade is no longer needed up2date will start working again.

Is this happening on RHEL4 also? I don’t know as I don’t have a RHEL4 64bit version available to test this, but probably this is happening on RHEL also.