Testing

One of the most important parts of any update is actually testing the update. Although updates released by Red Hat, Inc. have passed through their Quality Assurance Department, there is still value in at least a minimal smoke test of the package to ensure that nothing was missed.

1. Install the update locally and ensure that programs affected by the update still work as expected after the upgrade. The degree of testing here should be relative to the importance of the package in our environment. For example, testing for packages not installed by default could be a simple check to ensure that the programs run.

2. Test an update of a current machine using /usr/sbin/yup update to ensure that the automated update mechanism has no difficulties installing the package. To facilitate this you can point the RPM updating program (currently Yup) to ftp://rk-devel.pams.ncsu.edu/ <version>.

   For example, to reconfigure Yup you might replace or edit /etc/yup.conf to look like:

   .master http://www.linux.ncsu.edu/realmkit/yup.master.txt .dist-option NCSU Realm Kit for Red Hat Linux 7.3 .arch-option i386 .begin mirror-option .name Official Realm Kit Distribution Source .country USA .addr ftp://rk-devel.pams.ncsu.edu/7.3 .arch i386 .end .logfile /var/log/yup.log .checksig yes

   This example was taking from a Linux Realm Kit 7.3 machine.

3. Run a test kickstart-based reinstall to ensure that the installer doesn't have any problems with the updated package. A manual install will also work here but does take more time.

After we have tested the trees to make sure they are production quality, we are ready to do the proper notification and to push the new trees out to all the clients,