Red Hat up2date can stop email on name servers

[Steve Swaney]

Red Hat recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 4. We have seen
this update stop mail flow at several client sites on the email gateways
that are also running DNS named services.

If you are NOT running the named server, you should be able to run up2date
without problems.

If you are running the named services:

What we have seen is that installing these updates may cause named to fail
during the update. Here are the symptoms. At or near the end of the update
you will see:

..

117:gimp-print             ###########################################
[100%]
 118:redhat-config-printer  ###########################################
[100%
https://xmlrpc.rhn.redhat.com/XMLRPC
https://xmlrpc.rhn.redhat.com/XMLRPC
https://xmlrpc.rhn.redhat.com/XMLRPC
https://xmlrpc.rhn.redhat.com/XMLRPC
https://xmlrpc.rhn.redhat.com/XMLRPC

And the connection to the Red Hat up2date server fails. We believe this is
because the named service is killed by the up2date process. To correct this
error, first restart named:

service named restart

And this is a bit ugly, up2date seems to alter the system configuration to
NOT run named on boot. To make sure that named is configured to start at
boot, run:
            chkconfig named on

And we saw on one system that nscd was incorrectly configured to start on
boot. to make sure that nscd is not configured to start at boot time, run:

            chkconfig nscd off

And finally restart up2date:

      up2date -u

If up2date has any work yet to finish, it should complete normally.

Have a happy holidays Be careful out there,

Steve
Steve Swaney
President
Fortress Systems Ltd.
www.fsl.com
steve.swaney at fsl.com


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