Stratus FT 4300 and RHEL, Part 2

Well, it turns out that the only packages needed by the ft 4300 are just the kernel. This means that Stratus' customizations to the inittab and sysinit scripts are done manually. That could be done better.

I am a fervent believer in using rpm's for just about everything. We use them to create sysadmin accounts. We use them to delete old sysadmin accounts. We use them to distribute ssh keys. We "strongly" encourage the application developers to deliver all packages as rpm's and have been relatively successful getting them to follow through on that.

Typically the application developers will get third party software as tarballs or even (shudder) zip files. Turning these packages into rpm's is pretty trivial but it took a while to get the application developers into the habit of doing so. Having all of these packages as rpm's makes deployment and support possible across the hundreds of servers we support. Key to this success is using software channels on our Red Hat Satellite server.

But I digress.

Basically, I made backups of the two files in question and forced the up2date.

# cd /etc/
# cp inittab inittab.`date +%s`
# cd /etc/rc.d/
# cp rc.sysinit rc.sysinit.`date +%s`
# up2date --nox -f initscripts

It turned out that inittab didn't get touched after the up2date so no action was needed there. the rc.sysinit was a different story so I copied back the backup I made (even though up2date makes a backup itself, I am extra-cautious).

After that drama was over, I run the full "up2date -u" and watched it upgrade 551 other packages. 551. Why on earth did Stratus feel the need to do a FULL INSTALL? I don't need squirrelmail or thunderbird on a fault tolerant server!!!

Next up will be creating a custom software channel on the Satellite server for the ft 4300's kernel rpm's.