I would not consider the feature "missing," but very much provided for, in a "supportable" fashion. The only "missing" option is to provide out-of-date software with known security vunerabilities. I hope everyone recognizes Red Hat is not going to provide such an automated mechanism via Red Hat Network (RHN) itself, although Red Hat does provide the tools to do so internally if an organization wishes (options #1 and #2).
The #3 option in Extended Update Support (EUS) is an added support service which provides actual security updates to kernel, etc... So if one is on 5.3, and the ISV only provides kernel modules for the 2.6.18-128 series kernel, the EUS 5.3.z channel provides the following errata 2.6.18-128.18.1.el5 kernel (2010 July) with the latest bugfixes: http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2010-0508.html Or if one just needs the latest security update, errata 2.6.18-128.17.1.el5 kernel (2010 May) that addresses several CVEs: http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2010-0439.html Again, the other two (2) options are customer-maintained channels, with possibly out-of-date software with known security vunerabilities. It's up to the customer how they want to manage that risk if they run with software that is not the latest. The #2 option is the continuing value of a RHN Satellite Server. It is much, much easier than trying to maintain multiple, flat YUM repositories (#1 option), and provides the full, entire history of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release which one can pick'n choose from. ________________________________ From: James Harrison <[email protected]> I do have to say that this feature is missing and would be very valuable. I opened a Red Hat support case about this. This is their response: "Hello, Thank you for contacting Red Hat support services. We do have channels for only RHEL major versions like RHEL 3, RHEL 4 etc. but no separate channels minor versions like RHEL 5.4, RHEL 5.5, all packages come under RHEL 5 channel. So if you do a yum update that would only pull out latest package available. So there is no option available with yum to get only RHEL 5.4 updates. You have following options 1. Create a custom yum repository manually by adding RHEL 5.4 packages 2. Create a custom base channel on RHN/Satellite with RHEL 5.4 updates (packages need to be selected manually) and register the system to it. 3. For customers who want to stick with a minor release we have Extended Update Support offering. Please refer following URL. http://press.redhat.com/2008/12/18/red-hat-increases-service-levels-and-reduces-costs-for-customers-with-extended-update-support/ This is meant for mission critical customers who wants to backport latest packages to their required versions. For further details please contact our sales. Please let us know if you need any further assistance on this. Regards, " _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
