At work we use Linux somewhat extensively. I guess it’s more accurate to say that the Systems Engineers touch one of our servers almost everyday (not because it’s broken, but for normal useage). After deciding I finally needed to work on some much needed updates, I decided to play on one of our test systems and find out how easy the update process has gotten.

Seeing as how these are Redhat AS3 boxes, I’d figure that most of the headache over updating and upgrading the OS would be gone. Unfortunately it’s almost as bad as ever. Using the up2date feature does a great job of keeping your normal packages up to date, it’s integegration with the Red Hat Network also makes it really easy to monitor the status of your software packages as well. However attempting to use the ‘upgrade-to-release’ feature of up2date is more like having your fucking head wedged in the closing doors of a trash compactor.

The process starts easily enough ‘up2date –upgrade-to-release=4AS -u’ starts everything up as expected, then it all goes to hell. The up2date process upgrades itself of course (which you would expect), then when it attempts to restart it fucking fails flat out. 4 1/2 hours later and after having tracked down 31 RPMs, which I had to manually finesse into working correctly (this means a lot of ‘rpm -i –force –nodeps’), and I finally have the up2date process ready to run again. Even though it fucking tells me that all the packages are currently up to date for the system which is utter bullshit.

Even after having left Redhat years ago as a toy OS the issues which caused me to leave still havn’t been resolved, the RPM issue is still terrible of a nightmare as ever. Makes me glad that when these boxes are up and running they function like an OS should, trouble free, never ever go down, rock solid, but apparently don’t try to update it. I’m glad I moved on to something else. BTW I ended up just backing up the relevant user data to tar files and nuked the install for a fresh AS4 install. Worked fine that way…I just wish I hadn’t wasted time trying to do it the ‘easy’ way.