Red Hat: To patch or to upgrade?

[Mat Price]

What I have done in the past is make a directory on a ftp server with 
all update rpms except the kernel rpms.  Then I ran a script on the 
clients that would check the version of redhat it was running on, then 
download the correct rpms.  Once they where on the machine it did a  rpm 
-Fvh *.rpm.  This Freshen's/upgrades only the rpms you have installed. 
Then the the script would clean up after it's self.  I didn't do the 
kernel since it always went badly.  If I needed the kernel upgrade I 
would do it by hand and do a rpm -ivh <rpmfile> then edit grub.conf to 
point to the new kernal as the default.  If you have only a few machine 
writing the script may be over kill.  I wish I still had it but the 
project got lost a while back.  The other thing you could do is mount it 
over nfs if the clients have small drives or use sftp if you want to do 
it in a secure way.

mat