A call for recomendations and helpful some advice

[Jason Stephenson]

bscott at ntisys.com wrote:
>>... cause I didn't want to have to "sign up" to get updates.
> 
> 
>   Why not?
> 

While the question wasn't put to me directly, let me answer for why *I* 
didn't want to sign up for updates.

Under the RHN program (which up2date is one part of), you only get 1 
computer for free. Any more than that and you must pay. When I was a 
sysadmin at the University of KY (and BTW I'm looking for work if anyone 
is hiring), we had several dozen Red Hat machines, that we needed to 
keep upgraded and it was too much administrative hassle from my point of 
view to go about paying for a RHN subscription for the college. I'm sure 
the administration would have paid it, and RH probably would have given 
us a decent deal for an unlimited number of machines. However, I was 
lazy and impatient and didn't want to go through all the paperwork and 
time that something like that would take. After all, I've got machines 
that are vulnerable to sadmind and I need to upgrade them now, not in 5 
months.

So, having a 32 GB drive sitting in my workstation doing practically 
nothing, I did the logical thing. I ran wget to mirror 
updates.redhat.com for the releases of RH that had been installed or 
come preinstalled on workstations in the college. I then set that 
directory as an NFS share for the range of IP addresses used by the 
college. When we needed to upgrade machines, it was a simple matter to 
ssh to the box, mount the NFS partition, and do rpm -Fvh *.

At home, I do the same thing. (Which reminds me, I should check for 
updates. There was an OpenSSL thing the other day.)