Atomicorp

I have neither up2date nor yum installed on my RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 server that runs Plesk 7.5.4. What is the difference, if any, between up2date and yum?

I read on this site that: "Note: Red Hat Enterprise Linux users should use up2date, as Red Hat does not provide free access to binary updates." Is this true?

Some of the searching and forum reading I've done alludes to having both up2date and yum, why would you need both?

If the preferred option for my server is up2date, where can I get that?

up2date is the native updater for rhel3/rhel4. Updates for rhel are only available directly from Red Hat, on a paid subscription basis. yum is what we use on all the other RPM based distros that allow free updates.

For those of us using distros other than rhel3 or 4, its a matter of personal preference what to use (yum in my case). Id say something is wrong on your system if you dont have either.

Could I not have up2date because I have a virtual dedicated server? Perhaps my provider does not want me to update rhel3? (I don't have a subscription with RedHat, so perhaps it's all moot anyway.)

And this may seem like a dumb question, but from the root, I entered "man up2date" figuring I'd get some info if it were installed. I got nothing, so I assumed it wasn't installed. And while on the phone with my provider on an unrelated issue, I was advised to request up2date be installed through a help ticket. So again, I assumed it wasn't installed. I'm positive I don't have yum. But your skepticism about me having neither, makes me wonder if I am making incorrect assumptions. So, is there some other way for me to find out if I have up2date installed?

Yeah vserver providers dont always install that, they might be trying to maintain the packages in the vserver externally from the master.

I tried to install yum using the rpm package from this site for rhel3 and got an error.

Failed dependencies:
libxm12-python
rpm-python

What can I do about this?

Download the packages listed there and install them along with the yum package.

Fortunately, once you've got a decent package management system in place (e.g. yum or up2date) you won't need to resolve dependencies by hand any more.

Okay, I installed rpm-python. Then I tried to install libxml2-python, but that failed because I need python-2.3. So I tried installing python-2.3.4-13.1 and it failed because it needs libdb-4.2.so. I can't find libdb-4.2.so. Google turns up nothing. Though I did find libdb-4.0.so.

Yum eliminates this chaos, right? Unfortunately, I keep hitting brick walls trying to install Yum.

I installed the RPMs from this page:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/f ... es/3/i386/

Is there a better place to download the RPMs I need?

Try http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/f ... dora/RPMS/

The url you used contains updates to the rpms in the location above, but if a package hasn't had an update since the FC3 release it won't be in the updates folder.

And yes, yum eliminates this chaos, so I guess it's worth the hassle.

Hm, I just noticed you're running RHEL3 and are installing rpms from the Fedora 3 repositories. I don't think that'll work very well.

Nope, that probably won't work very well. Did I mention I'm an idiot?

I'm happy to say that I got the dependent RPMs installed (once I used the correct rpms for my server), and was then able to install ART's yum. I imported the GPG key and modified the yum.conf, however when I execute yum check-update, I get a file not found error:

Server: Atomic Rocket Turtle - 3AS - Atomic PSA-Compatible RPMS
retrygrab() failed for:
http://www.atomicrocketturtle.com/atomi ... eader.info

Now I'm assuming it's the 3AS that's the problem. And I'm probably going to show my cluelessness again here, but does that mean I'm using a server that's not compatible? Or can I hard code 3ES into the URL?

You'd want 3ES, not 3AS

so does that mean redhat 3AS won't work?

It should work, you just need to use the 3ES archive.

It works. You just need to hard code the 3ES into the config file, instead of using releasever.