[CentOS] Caught between a Red Hat and a CentOS

[ken]

War is a failure of the imagination.
        --William Blake



On 10/19/2009 06:29 PM Keith Keller wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 08:29:59AM +1030, Ian Blackwell wrote:
>> My experience has been good and I have no negative feelings about their
>> support offering.  We had a critical issue once on a production server
>> with 250 users, and that they solved for us very quickly.  Other lower
>> priority issues have been resolved in appropriate time frames.
> 
> I am curious, for those who have used RH support, what sorts of issues
> they have (or have not) resolved.  Are these relatively simple issues,
> or do you (and they) end up digging into the guts of the kernel?
> 
> --keith

Okay, here's one.  Maybe someone here can figure it out.

Upgrading from 4.5 to 4.5.  From a 4.6 ISO I copied all the RPMs into a
directory... let's call it c:/install :).   Now the oracle dba has
strict parameters on what versions can be installed and which can't.
The rpms in c:/install meet those requirements.  In addition, since this
is a production machine, it can be down at most for one day.  So all I
want to do is upgrade what's currently on the system.  Moreover, if
something horks, I want two chances to back out (the second being asking
the backup guy to put the system back to yesterday).  The command to do
this would be

rpm --freshen --repackage *

run in that crazy c:/install directory (or what the redhat guy called, a
"folder").  This command runs fine for one file which has no
dependencies (i.e., change '*' to a specific rpm).  It also upgrades
three or four co-dependent rpms if they're narrowly specified.  But if
the file/rpm spec is '*', rpm complains about two missing dependencies
and stops.

Yeah, this directory contains 1507 rpms (IIRC)... which is a lot, but it
should still work.  This is Linux, after all.  And there's plenty enough
memory and cpu to handle it.

[The rh support written response was that there wasn't a problem, that
this was "expected behavior".  When I phoned the guy and gently pressed
him on that statement, he backed off of it a little, said, "yeah, it
should work" but "no one does it that way" and I "really shouldn't
expect it to work."]

I had a couple other issues with the same command, but I'm not in the
office now and don't recall them.  Yep, my brain's in time-off mode.

But anyone have any experience or background, enough to say why that rpm
command above is failing so miserably... and then what might fix it?

If so, big thanks.