Scheduled packages not updated on RHEL 5 or 6 client and showing updated on satellite

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Network Satellite (RHNS) 5

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 or 6 client

Issue

  • Scheduled package updates are not installed on client system through satellite server as following:
  1. Schedules package update from satellite server for system profile.
  2. Event log shows that package installed successfully on this system profile.
  3. On system, still package is not updated and new update is appearing in available update list.
  • Packages recently added to a channel are not being found by yum on the client

Resolution

An erratum has been released for yum-rhn-plugin in RHEL 5 Update 7 that corrects a part of this issue:

When using RHN Classic or RHN Satellite to schedule an installation or update
on the client system with outdated Yum's metadata cache, the "rhn_check" utility
incorrectly reported success. This error has been fixed and the scheduled action
fails if Yum does not find any new packages to install or update. (BZ#667135)

Other steps that may help:

  • After pushing packages or updates to a channel, it may be necessary to wait up to several minutes for the channel repodata to be regenerated.  It may be possible to manually trigger the repodata regeneration
  • If the client only made or refreshed its yum cache for that channel within the last 6 hours (based on the timestamp of /var/cache/yum/<arch>/<channel>/cachecookie), you must either
    • Wait until 6 hours have passed, so the client will check for updated channel metadata, OR
    • Manually clean the channel metadata on the client:
      # yum clean all
      

Root Cause

Any package pushed to satellite server takes some time (15   minutes) to become available for client systems registered on satellite server while the taskomatic server regenerates the repository metadata.  It also takes RHN/RHNS clients 6 hours for their cached metadata to expire, so if that cache was generated less than 6 hours ago, the client will not look for updated metadata and thus will be unaware of the new or updated packages in the channel.  For repositories not managed through RHNS, there is a yum configuration setting called metadata_expire which can be set in /etc/yum.conf or in individual repo files, that will enabled yum to expire its cached metadata at a shorter interval.  However this setting is not available for channels managed in RHNS.

A request has been made to Red Hat engineering to change the implementation of rhnplugin to respect the metadata_expire setting (either from /etc/yum.conf or /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/rhnplugin.conf).  There is also a request to change the behavior of Satellite so that it does not incorrectly report that the scheduled action was successful when it was not.  Relevant bugzillas:

[RHEL 6] rhnplugin does not respect metadata_expire setting

[RHEL 5] rhnplugin does not respect metadata_expire setting

[RHEL 6] rhn_check incorrectly reports success when packages weren't found due to out-of-date yum cache

[RHEL 5] rhn_check incorrectly reports success when packages weren't found due to out-of-date yum cache

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