[CentOS] yum-updatesd not working on CentOS 5.2

Mon Jul 14 15:37:27 UTC 2008
John Horne <john.horne at plymouth.ac.uk>

On Fri, 2008-07-11 at 17:42 +0100, John Horne wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 12:12 +0200, Santi Saez wrote:
> > 
> > So, appears that yum-updatesd can download, notify and install  
> > updates.. but none of this works on a fresh CentOS 5.2 :-(
> > 
Well I tested this on Centos 5.1 and 5.2, as well as Fedora 9. It does
seem to work. For CentOS 5.2 I simply installed the scim-docs RPM, which
we do not usually have installed but it does have an update waiting.
Having configured yum-updatesd to do an automatic update in 15 mins, I
then just left it. After 15 mins it had applied the update. So it
worked.

In my case the problem is that I have configured yum-updatesd for
notifications by syslog. It seems that the syslog option only works when
updates are 'available'. If you ask for them to be automatically
updated, or if an error occurs, then nothing is logged. (If you use the
email option then you get the errors or update count as a mail message.)
On my 5.1 systems, we have modified yum.conf to exclude the kernel and
glibc packages from updating - we prefer to do those manually. However,
this then means that when yum-updatesd runs, to update the system to
centos 5.2, it gets a dependency error because of our excluded packages.
As mentioned above, using syslog this is not logged at all. (Taking out
the exclusions, and configuring yum-updatesd not to do updates, and I
then correctly get a syslog message that 239 updates are available.)

I have created a patch to the /usr/libexec/yum-updatesd-helper file
which I will log in to the RedHat bugzilla tonight. (I want to check
things on my F9 PC at home before submitting the bugzilla log.) The
patch logs errors and the number of applied updates when using syslog.
Tested, and it works fine (it was how I found out about the missing
dependencies on our 5.1 server).

So, perhaps not much help to the OP I'm afraid, but it sorted out what I
think is a bug (with the syslog option).



John.

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK  Tel: +44 (0)1752 587287
E-mail: John.Horne at plymouth.ac.uk       Fax: +44 (0)1752 587001