Disclaimer (tutorial updated 11th October 2002)

By default, Redhat installed off the internet does not necessarily install with the latest packages and a CD-ROM install may be out of date or have bugs that can be used for hackers to attach your Redhat Linux system. Thus checking for updated programs and RPMs (Redhat Package Manager) are mandatory. The AutoRPM (http://www.autorpm.org/) program by Kirk Bauer makes this much easier to do and can potentially automate this process. Be wary that updating some progarms such as netscape may require manual intervention due to strangeness with the dependencies that autorpm cannot handle.

Another note of warning is to be wary that on automatically updating programs as described here as the updating might over-write a secure configation file with a default configuration file. If concerned about this, it may be best not to have automatic updates of installed programs but be warned of updates and then update manually.

Note: Because of variations in install, multiple toolsets, (never knowing whether a previous install might have affected the next one); some/all(?) of the following information might be wrong; and there are probably better methods for doing the following. Keep this in mind and feel free to think a bit before blindly following the instructions. It is assumed you are logged in a root to do the following.

Autorpm can be used on other types of Linux (Debian Linux has it's own auto-updating system using the apt program - refer: http://www.debian.org/security/).

A related package (mainly for validating what is installed) is CheckPackages ("Compares filesystem against RPM database") (http://www.autorpm.org/)

Installing AutoRPM

Downloading and Installing AutoRPM

• You are now ready to download and install the actual AutoRPM program.
  • To get AutoRPM for Linux: ftp://ftp.kaybee.org/pub/redhat/RPMS/noarch/
    

  • Install AutoPRM using the command: rpm -Uvh autorpm-3.0.2-6.noarch.rpm

• AutoRPM docs: http://www.autorpm.org/tabs/docs/

To run autorpm to upgrade your Redhat Linux distribution, first decide which update area you will be targetting based on the closest Redhat Mirror area: (http://www.redhat.com/mirrors.html).
(ftp://updates.redhat.com/7.3/en/os/)

Edit the /etc/autorpm.d/pools/redhat-updates file and delete the mirrors that you don't want used in the pool.

To run autorpm manually and automatically and configuring the autorpm configuration files.

• The configuration files exists in /etc/autorpm.d/

• Edit /etc/autorpm.d/autorpm.conf and:
  • Under Set_Var, ReportDest set the reporting Email address correct to your preferred Email address. (e.g., yourname@yourdomain - default is root for the computer - thus change "root" to your Email.)
  • You may as well manually tell autorpm that it is updating Redhat 7.3

  • You may want to set that it only prompts with the relevant architecture rpms

    Set_Var("Arch", "i686|i386");

• Edit /etc/autorpm.d/redhat-updates.conf and:
  • To have autorpm automatically inform you about kernel updates (and download the kernel RPMs) (This is not recommended!):
    • Comment out: Regex_Ignore("^kernel-");

    • This might be a bad idea as you will get all the kernel types

  • to have autorpm automatically update the updated RPMs (This is not recommended!), under "action updated" Change:
    • Comment out: Install (Interactive);

    • Uncomment: Install (Auto);

    • This will not affect RPMs for the (new) RPMs that are not installed on the system already.

  • To get notified what went on as a single Email:
    • Make sure the following is stated at Report_To ("$[ReportDest]");:

    • Otherwise comment out: Report_To ("");

    • Uncomment: Report_To ("$[ReportDest]");

• Once installed, you should run autorpm using the command autorpm auto . This will then go to the RPM updates site specified in the config file and then download the RPMs (but not auto-install them - unless you configured this to autoinstall)

  This may take a while depending on the internet link and the speed of the computer). On completion, (and if there are any changes/updates/potential installs) autorpm will E-mail you with an output stating (with the above configuration) what files it updated and what files are new/require manual intervention for updating. Note that if it thinks there may be a problem updating a particular RPM, it will not do this but state this in the Email it sends (most commonly this would be due to the RPM missing dependencies).

• Now run autorpm. Input the command list to find out what RPMs are available to install.
  (When running autorpm the first time, type Y to install the "Perl module Term::ReadLine::Gnu")

• Delete the rpms you don't want

• upgrade all to upgrade the rest

• (By default, the RPMs are temporarily downloaded into the /var/spool/autorpm directory)

Be wary that after running "autorpm" that some services may have been restarted in a mode that may make it visible it to hackers. A Redhat 6.0 example was with XFree86 in that Port 6000 became visible again (this was disabled in the Redhat Linux install tutorials using the "-nolisten tcp" option)

• To have it that on starting Xwindow, Xwindows does not listen on Port 6000
  • as root on a root shell, type, which startx (this should tell you that startx is at "/usr/X11R6/bin/startx"
  • Edit (normally using vi - unless you have a user-frienly editor installed) the "/usr/X11R6/bin/startx" file and under both clientargs and serverargs add -nolisten tcp
  • DONE! :-) Now when you start Xwindows, Port 6000 will not be open.