Konstantin,

I do not do so deliberately -- but the mechanism I mentioned is the one 
that EL presents.  The script you provide is not part of  any "howto" 
that I can find -- and most of the time, neither my students/research 
associates or I have the time to research and develop/test such things 
unless necessary.  (In some cases, as with the current Nvidia CUDA 5 
setup, we do out of necessity.)  Thank you for the contribution.

A related question:  is there a way to burn an update DVD that will 
contain the files that your script downloads and uses so that the update 
can be burned on a machine with decent network bandwidth (e.g., 
accessing the LambaRail or whatever the current name is for this 
research backbone) and then utilized locally without accessing any 
network?  In other words, going to the repo list authorized for a 
machine -- how does one get just the updated (update) rpm (etc.) files 
that are needed and how does one organize these on the DVD image so that 
your script will use these from said DVD?

Thanks,

Yasha

On 04/11/2013 09:57 AM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> Yasha - of all possibilities you always choose the most painful, without fail.
>
> I update SL6.x to SL6.4 using this script. Running the SL installer (anaconda) unnecessary pain.
>
>
> #!/bin/sh
> YES=-y
> cat /etc/redhat-release
> uname -a
> /bin/ls -ltr /boot | grep vmli | tail -1
> yum clean all
> yum $YES --releasever=6.4 update sl-release
> yum clean all
> yum $YES update "yum*" "rpm*"
> yum $YES update
>
>
> K.O.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 09:38:21AM -0700, Yasha Karant wrote:
>> After updating my IA-32 image SL 6 laptop to SL 6.4 using the update
>> pathway from the automatically displayed anaconda GUI using the
>> approximately 4Gbyte update/install DVD, rebooting and using the
>> system, the red "badge" (Update Applet 2.28.3) with a bang appeared
>> on the upper panel.  The claim is presented for 148 updates.  I
>> attempted to use the automatically displayed GUI updater that is
>> invoked from the red badge icon.  In addition to be exceptionally
>> slow because of poor USA DSL bandwidth at my home, the following
>> diagnostics appeared:
>>
>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>>    File "/usr/share/PackageKit/helpers/yum/yumBackend.py", line 2798,
>> in install_signature
>>      self.yumbase.getKeyForPackage(pkg, askcb = lambda x, y, z: True)
>>    File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line
>> 4765, in getKeyForPackage
>>      result, errmsg = self.sigCheckPkg(po)
>>    File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line
>> 2189, in sigCheckPkg
>>      sigresult = rpmUtils.miscutils.checkSig(ts, po.localPkg())
>>    File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/rpmUtils/miscutils.py",
>> line 67, in checkSig
>>      fdno = os.open(package, os.O_RDONLY)
>> OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/cache/yum/i386/6.4/adobe-linux-i386/packages/AdbeRdr9.5.4-1_i486linux_enu.rpm'
>>
>>
>> could not add package update for lcms2-2.3-2.el6(i686)epel:
>> lcms2-2.3-2.el6.i686
>>
>> I cancelled the update and will try again later.
>>
>> 1.  Does anyone know what is causing the above (recall that the DVD
>> 6.4 upgrade was successful)?
>>
>> 2.  As the on-line update is VERY slow for my situation, I attempted
>> to let the process run overnight unattended.  Is there anyway to do
>> this automated install so that it will simply skip those packages
>> that "fail" (as the above) without requiring root password
>> authentication intervention, similar to the -y switch on fsck.  I
>> realize that such automation is not ideal, but it would be less
>> total time to re-install from DVD in the event that the process
>> resulted in a no-boot or highly unstable system.
>>
>> Thanks for any insight.
>>
>> Yasha Karant
>