how do I create a 6.2 child channel with subscription for 6.4

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I have subscription for 6.4 but I need to upgrade my systems from 6.1 to 6.2,

can I create channel child or something else to be able to download from RHN only U2 and not U4?

Many thanks.

Responses

If you are using Subscription Management, you have access to the 6.2 stream. I assume you are using Satellite5?

Hi Eugene,
I'm afraid the channels don't inherently work in the manor you describe (i.e. making a child channel for a minor release). There is a single Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Base Channel (rhel-x86_64-server-6) and the minor releases track against that Base Channel as they are released. Currently I believe the RHEL 6 Base is around 12,500 packages.

Now - if you are kickstarting, you can change the "Kickstartable Tree" to one of the minor releases when you create the kickstart profile (or you can update one that already exists).
Otherwise, if you have already kickstarted some systems at 6.0 and would like to update them to 6.2 (and not 6.5 as is current), you have a few options possible. One method is to create a clone at a point in time that 6.2 was released, which will clone all the packages and errata to that date. I believe there is also some yum foo that can be done to patch to a certain point in time. If you have another system currently at a release that you like, you could create a Profile and sync to that Profile - however, that can be risky if there are different packages between the systems (i.e. if source host has Netbackup and the destination does not, it will attempt to also put Netbackup on the destination - or vice versa).

Could you provide some more detail for your overall goal?

Using the profile sync method, you could:
* create a new kickstart profile, using ks-rhel-x86_64-server-6-6.2 as the kickstartable tree
* make sure that you disable the update (either in your kickstart profile, or your bootstrap "FULLY_UPDATE_THIS_BOX"
* create a profile of that 6.2 host (under Software | Packages | Profiles)
* select a test host and compare the packages. If it looks good, you can then attempt to sync the 6.1 host to the 6.2 profile. The sync process will very explicitly indicate what it is about to do and allow you to manually intervene (to exclude/ignore packages) and it will also allow you to cancel throughout the process

Thanks guys...

I remember with version 5 was possible to create channels linked to a minor release using spacewalk-create-channel command + vesion + update...

James I agree to use a a list of software but I don`t have any system at 6.2, my systems are all on 6.1...

Hi Eugene,

You can use spacewalk-create-channel command to create custom channel for specific minor release of RHEL.

This kbase will help you - https://access.redhat.com/site/solutions/42232

Regards,
Ashish

Thanks Ashish/Eugene! I actually was not aware that you could create Base Channels that way (based on a minor-release).. I thought they were dependent on a date.

Eugene - does that seem as though it meet your requirements?

Thanks Ashish...

Ashish, thanks for posting that, I needed this as well.

It seems this might have been discussed in the 2012 Red Hat Summit see slides 141 - 151 (especially 151) from the 2012 Red Hat Summit by Thomas Cameron (PDF file), where he speaks of using spacewalk­-clone­by­-date rpm, in the spacewalk-­utils RPM, written by Justin Sherrill. Then see the resultant of the use of that in slides (link in this paragraph) 154-155.

It looks like the 2012 Red Hat Summit slides above show this being done for RHEL 5.4 and 6.2.

Thanks again Ashish

Remmele

Hi Remmele, James, Lorenzo,

Yes using spacewalk-create-channel & spacewalk-clone-by-date command you can create channels for minor release of RHEL. Difference between these two commands is that for

  1. "spacewalk-create-channel" we need to pass RHEL version and its minor version so satellite internally take list of packages for that release and create clone channel.

  2. Where as in "spacewalk-clone-by-date" command if we pass date when RHEL minor version is released then based on that clone channel will be created. As per Summit slides we are passing release date of RHEL 5.4 ie 02 Sept 2009

Either of these options should solve your purpose.

Regards,
Ashish

Thanks Ashish - and thanks for the help you've provided in the past with the cases we've submitted.

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