/etc/redhat-release file is not updated...

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I got problem on our Linux server which is RHEL 6. I have upgraded the kernel from 6.7 to 6.9 by patching kernel-2.6.32-696.el6.x86_64.rpm, but /etc/redhat-release file was not updated. Here are the result of command to confirm their version.

 >cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.7 (Santiago)

>uname -a
Linux hostname 2.6.32-696.6.3.e16.x86-64

The uname command said 6.9, but redhat-release said 6.7. I've upd the kernel to 6.9 once again with force option, but it didn't fix the issue. Any advice or suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Responses

The /etc/redhat-release file is not owned by the kernel package, it is owned by the redhat-release-server package:

# rpm -qf /etc/redhat-release
redhat-release-server-6Server-6.9.0.4.el6.x86_64

So you can update redhat-release-server if you want /etc/redhat-release to say "6.9" but you'll still be running the rest of the packages from 6.7 and have some mix of packages from the two minor releases. We do support this but we don't explicitly test for problems with it. If you run into an issue in future, we may need you to update another package to resolve that issue.

It is probably better if you update all packages with yum update, though make sure you test this in your test environment first.

Mr. Bainbridge,

Thank you very much for reply, and it really helps me a lot. I was misunderstanding about redhat-release and kernel. Actually we don't have yum server for now, so I downloaded the latest red hat package 6.9 from vendor site, then I confirmed the /etc/redhat-release file was updated correctly. I really appreciate your advice.

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