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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My first contribution to the site will cover some basics about yum (so Debian users can skip this, sorry for that). Yum is the standard package manager of CentOS and Fedora Core. It is used for maintenance of your software on your system.
Most common tasks are installing and removing software on your system. In the background yum can update all software and – very important – can solve software dependencies automatically (a thing, the simple RPM command can’t do). Solving software dependencies means: yum knows when program A needs program B to work and will also install program B if you choose to install program A.

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20060811: If you will run today up2date on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 system you will notice that there are many updated packages available. This because Red Hat has released the 4th update of RHEL4 and even if we can’t see it yet on the main update page http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/notes/
this new update is already available and if you have set the system to automatically update itself, you might even have the system already updated to RHEL4 update4.

You can quickly check your running version using:

cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 (Nahant Update 3)

after the update it will look like this:

cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 (Nahant Update 4)

Even if we can’t see yet the link to the changelog of this update on the redhat update page here is the direct link with details on the changes done in this update:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/release-notes/as-x86/RELEASE-NOTES-U4-x86-en.html

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 :-).

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.