Rhel Packages

We often encounter RedHat Enterprise Linux servers that have not been updated because of RPM repositories not being configured or because of mission subscriptions.

As a first step, you always want to check - are there any repositories: yum repolist all (use “dnf” instead of “yum”, if available). You will likely also see the /etc/yumrepos.d/redhat.repo file, managed by the subscription-manager utility.

The subscription-manager can tell you if the RHEL box you are working on has an active subscription. Use subscription-manager list or subscription-manager status to get this info - you should not be seeing “Status: Expired” or “Overall Status: Invalid” in the output of these commands. If you do see this, you can attempt to re-register the RHEL box with:

sudo /usr/sbin/subscription-manager register --force --org org_name --activationkey the_key
sudo /usr/sbin/subscription-manager attach --auto

You can enable optional repositories with yum-config-manager --enable=<repo-id> (where repo-id can be something like rhel-6-server-optional-rpms)

With the needed subscription, you can then look for updates with yum check-update or yum list obsoletes (yum list obsoletes can also accept a wildcard expression) and then apply the updates with yum update (yum upgrade is similar, but also removes obsolete packages).

Note: yum list updates also lists updated packages in the repo that are not installed