John Stanley wrote: >> Now this is my last question: >> Can I be reasonably (say 90%) sure that the above command >> will not stop the server running? The command in question was: rpm -Uvh --force *.rpm where the RPMs were glibc and glibc-common. > No you can NOT and don't ever assume that. > That's a mistake thinking that. Aren't you exaggerating a little? There are a lot of commands I would feel perfectly safe giving remotely, eg "sudo yum update" which I've said a couple of times a week for the last 3 years without any disasters resulting. The trouble with the command above is that I am not sure if a change in glibc would affect a running kernel? I suspect that it would not. >> The problem is that the server is a long way away (in another country) >> and I won't have any way of contacting it if it stops running. > > Wait and schedule a downtime window for it. I don't know what a "downtime window" is in this context. I'm either in the same place as the server, or I am not. > If the machine in question has like a Fencing Device (like a drac card ) > with an IP addy that's public then maybe (that is card dependent). I'm not really in that kind of environment. It isn't the end of the world if the machine goes down; just a little annoying. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College Dublin