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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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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