Manage Red Hat patches

The second phase of the Red Hat Patching mechanism – although optional, sometimes can be very important in the patching process. Since Red Hat patches are just normal RPM packages you can do all the operations that SA Client allows you to do on Red Hat packages:

• Open the package
• Viewing and editing package properties
• Viewing package contents
• Viewing all software policies associated with a package
• Deleting a package
• Renaming a package
• Locating packages in Folders

Restricting access to RPM folders

SA builds a custom RPM repository for use by both Red Hat Patching mechanism and the software management jobs. This is built on a server-by-server basis, taking into account several packages and server properties and user-defined settings.

The repository that SA downloads to a managed server before actually scanning the server for recommended patches is built as follows:

• Packages whose platform set does not include the server platform are excluded from the RPM repository.
• Packages in folders whose customer constraints do not include the customer of the server are excluded from the RPM repository.
• If one or more repo.restrict custom attributes are defined for a particular server, only packages in the folders specified by these custom attributes are included in the RPM repository.

In SA, you can specify in a custom attribute the folders in the SA Library that the server has access to. All other folders will be inaccessible to the server. This gives you folder-level control over which versions of RPMs can be applied to a given server, allowing you to precisely manage platform update versions, for example Red Hat Linux Server 6 Update 4 versus Update 5.