Notification and Pushing the Trees

It is important, at a bear minimum, to inform the community what changes are about to happen to the Realm Kit trees. There are some people out there that take the base kit and do even more modifications. Also, this keeps the IT folk informed about what security updates have and have not taken place. This step is pretty closely related to pushing the trees to the public servers so I will include information about that here too.

The template for the email notification has recently be changed to make them much more easier to handle, especially when you are updating multiple errata at a time. You will need a description, the errata type (such as "Security Advisory" etc.), affected versions or the Realm Kit, and the URL to Red Hat's errata. All of this information can be gotten from Red Hat's errata page. Also, a shorter message should be posted to SysNews containing a short description of the changes to the trees.

Its good practice to send out the errata announcements before the new trees are pushed to the public servers. Normally, I try to wait at least 24 hours between sending out the updates and when the public servers will get the new trees.

Below is a step by step method for notification and pushing the new trees.

1. Fill out the errata template located at /dist/new-advisory with the current date, descriptions, affected versions, and URLs.

2. Email completed errata advisory to <realmlinux-announce@lists.ncsu.edu>. Posting to this list requires moderator approval. Hopefully, if you are doing updates you'll not have a problem with this.

3. Make a posting on SysNews under the Linux organization. I normally list the errata and versions and give a pointer to the archives of the realmlinux-announce mailing list.

4. Wait at least 24 hours.

5. Push the trees from the build machine to the main repository for the NCSU Realm Kit for Red Hat Linux. This can be done by SSH'ing into the repository master.linux.ncsu.edu . Use rsync to sync the trees from the build machine to their proper place in the /export/updates directory. Using the current configuration, as of this writing, if the trees are synced before 11:00 PM then they should propagate to the public servers that night.

A few notes about the main repository server. It actually holds two copies of all the trees. The /export/updates is a staging area to upload updates to. At 11:00 PM that area is synced to /export/trees which is the public space that is shared out via rsync and used by other servers (such as kickstart.linux.ncsu.edu to sync their copies which, in turn, is the server that all clients get their updates from.

Well, that's all folks. After following these instructions you should now have errata being installed automatically on clients and completely up to date install trees that you can use to install. Good luck!