Thanks for responding Glen. Based on your similar observations, I am starting to view up2date as more equivalent to the rpm command; both are mainly intended for MANAGING the packages that make Fedora Core work. Thus, yum becomes the tool for EXTENDING Fedora. When I view it this way, I find the whole package management system a bit more graspable. Meanwhile, this does not resolve the fact that both yum and up2date (using yum as its underlying engine) both look to add-on repositories as sources of some of the base and extra Fedora packages, which, to me, causes some confusing overlap. The checkboxes on the first page of the up2date wizard that are supposed to activate and deactivate channels seem to do nothing at all, so, instead, I have found that by renaming the dag.repo file before running up2date limits returned updates to Red Hat supplied ones only. Then, I update dag installed packages manually using yum. It's not the easiest solution, but it works for the moment. I'm still conservative about updating, as I need my servers to be as reliable as Fedora can possibly achieve, and I am convinced that mixing and matching from repositories will more likely lead to version conflicts, despite the best efforts of the repository maintainers. If you, or anyone else, can recommend a better set of practices for updating, I'd be appreciative. Thanks, Steven