HOWTO: The Computer Classroom July 7, 2001  
 
 

4.1 Software Updates

One of the most important tasks for maintaining your LAN is upgrading software on your server and workstations whenever new versions become available. A popular place to get updates is at Red Hat’s own update site, ftp://ftp.redhat.com/. Get into the habit of checking this site every week or so for updated software packages. I use a program that also comes with Red Hat, called NcFTP. Make a directory in /usr/local called “updates,” and switch to this directory:

mkdir /usr/local/updates
cd /usr/local/updates

Next, use NcFTP to connect to Red Hat’s update site:

ncftp updates.redhat.com

Then you want to change into the current directory. The latest release of Red Hat is 7.1, so you will issue this command:

cd 7.0/en/os/i386
dir

The last command will list the contents of this directory. To download any files, type:

bin
get file_name

Or, if you want to retrieve all the updates (not a bad idea), type:

get *

A progress bar will show you each file being downloaded, and a final beep will let you know when all of the files have been received. You can then type “quit” to get back to your server’s command prompt.

Now that you have received all of the updates, you can use the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) to install the updates. For each package, type:

rpm –F package_name

If the package is not already installed on your machine, this will not work. The “-F” stands for freshen, and RPM cannot freshen a package that is not installed. Let’s update the installation of ssh that we talked about above. Simply type the following:

cd /usr/local/updates
wget ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.0/en/os/i386/openssh-2.5.2p2-1.7.2.i386.rpm
wget ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.0/en/os/i386/openssh-clients-2.5.2p2-1.7.2.i386.rpm
wget ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.0/en/os/i386/openssh-askpass-2.5.2p2-1.7.2.i386.rpm
wget ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.0/en/os/i386/openssh-askpass-gnome-2.5.2p2-1.7.2.i386.rpm
rpm –Uvh open*

After the final command, your updated software will be ready to use.

 
   
 
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