Hey All...

In the past in other data centers I always had the option of having the data center upgrade my kernel, as I am nervous doing it remotely.

I now have a new box here at EV1, which is not yet a production server and I am at the point I would like to do kernel upgrades myself.

I have read many kernel upgrade posts on these and other forums, but many are so long, with conflicting info it is difficult to follow. Not only that but most are not for RHE at this point, and/or don't have all the info I am looking for to be comfortable doing this update.

So here are the questions....

Am I able to upgrade the kernel via up2date on a RHE box, and do I still need to register at redhat?

I'd like to make sure the new kernel is installed without removing/overwriting the old one, so the box could be booted to the old version if needed.

Can someone help with the steps to perform an upgrade on a new RHE box. Although I searched, I didn't really find a step-by-step for RHE...
so would this one from this thread. be the way to go? The thread is huge, and was originally started in '02.

At this point the machine is a standard RHE/CPanel server except for the addition of a firewall, and tweaks/upgrades/security offered via WHM.

Is there anything to be aware of, or changes that shouldn't be made due to cPanel?

I recently did several software upgrades, added some custom stuff, then like a moron... changed my cpanel from stable to release which botched almost everything I had done... so I had to get a restore done. I decided this time to go for the kernel before adding anything other than the few items mentioned above.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Yes, you can use up2date - your EV1 box should already be registered with RHN anyway so it will already work



The first part of the thread is all that you actually need anyway - this is the part with the instructions. As long as you follow these, installing the kernel via rpm -ivh and not -Uvh the old kernel will be left in place. In the event then that the new kernel does not work, EV1 will reboot the server using the old kernel if you request it

Great...

Thanks for the info. I'll give this a shot later today, and see how it goes!

What I do is I've configured up2date to NOT skip the kernel but I changed it so that the bootloader config isnt changed and the box doesnt reboot. In up2date --configure I have them set like this:

9. pkgSkipList ['sendmail*']
12. noBootLoader Yes
37. noReboot Yes

Then I simply do up2date -u and let it install everything.

When I get a kernel upgrade it will tell me on screen of any errors or problems (which would be the same with doing it manually). I then go to change the bootloader conf

cd /etc
pico lilo.conf

This is only for lilo users, Grub is different! Make sure you know which bootloader you use first!
(Yes I did write a how-to for it in the how-to section)


Since the kernel will add it's "profile" to the bootloader conf you should see an entry for the newest kernel installed. The latest kernel looks something like this:


What you need to do is change the line near the top which says "default:" it will have the current kernel still there. On a default ev1 install it will say something like "default: RHE1" which boots the smp kernel. On ev1's default there will be 2 profiles added, one for the non-smp and one for smp. If you use a multi processor box then always use smp. I will continue with a single processor box.

To make the latest kernel boot you need to look for label line in the new kernel's profile (see above) and then change that default line so that it has your new kernel's label.

So for that kernel profile above you would change it to:
default=2.4.21-15.EL
(Smp kernels usually have the ending of ELsmp)

Once you've made that change you can save and exit. Do not reboot yet! You need to run lilo so it knows of the changes or bad things can happen on reboot.

You can run this a couple of ways, I dont bother with flags.
lilo -v
or just lilo

It should show you stuff like:
Added 2.4.21-15.EL *
Added 2.4.21-9.0.3.EL

There may be some others in there but it doesnt matter, the one with the * is the one which will boot on reboot.. Once all that is done, you can reboot without a problem and it should come back up with the new kernel installed.

Thanks for the help guys.

I followed Err0r's suggestions, along with that original thread, and had an sucessful and uneventful kernel upgrade.

Checked with uname -a ?

Actually I checked with uname -r

But I just did uname -a just in case!

Looks like all went well... No problems at all with the server overnight, or with any WHM/cPanel updates.

Thanks for the tips!