<snip> Although this is really not the list for this explanation, here goes: RHEL requires subscriptions to use, your (your company's) acceptance to use it means that you have agreed to maintain a subscription. You are in violation of your EULA if you are using RHEL and not maintaining a subscription. That has nothing to do with yum or up2date. Yum and up2date are two tools (smart package manager and apt are 2 others) that can perform dependency resolution and install packages. (Dependency resolution means that if you say that you want to install "Package A" ... and if "Package A" requires that "Package B" is installed ... and if you don't have "Package B" installed, the dependency resolver tells you (and optionally installs for you) "Package B" when you try to install "Package A") Anyway, the tools yum and up2date (and the others I mentioned before) require server maintained repositories of packages that people can use. These repositories contain packages (the RPMS that get installed) and information about the packages (what versions are available, called metadata). Yum and up2date take the metadata and compare that to what you have installed on your machine and tell you what packages are available for update IN THE REPOSITORIES that you have them configured to look at. For RHEL, the repositories are not free. There are also not any yum repositories available for RHEL. The only repositories available are the up2date repositories that are part of Red Hat Network. Access to those repositories requires a subscription. Installing yum, when no yum repositories exist for RHEL will not get you updates. Since you have little experience maintaining Linux distributions, I would recommend that you renew your RHEL subscriptions and use up2date to stay updated. -------------------------- There are "Rebuild Projects" available that take the source provided by the upstream provider and rebuild RPMS that you can use. They do have free updates and have software with the same version numbers as the upstream provider ... however, they do not have paid 4 hour or next day support, etc. CentOS is one such project. They have quality software, but if you use CentOS, you will not be using RHEL ... and any 3rd party software (like Oracle, IBM DB2, etc.) that requires RHEL as a supported OS might still function, but will not be covered under warranty if you switch from RHEL. The "Rebuild Projects" provide quality software ... but if you need official paid support or if you need an officially supported OS for 3rd Party Software then your only real option is to stay with RHEL or hire someone to maintain your servers. -------------------------- I'm sure that there are several consultants who read this list who would quote you prices to maintain your RHEL server(s), or to evaluate your server(s) and tell you what you need or even if you can switch to one of the "Rebuild Projects". I would be glad to do that if you contact me off list, I'm sure others will be glad to as well. -------------------------- Thanks, Johnny Hughes CentOS-4 Lead Developer <http://www.centos.org/> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/yum/attachments/20061022/a62b292c/attachment.bin
