RHEL w/out Entitlement - problems upgrading?

[Amin Taheri]

I am posting in hopes this will help some one.

I have several RHEL 4 boxes, and not all of them have an active entitlement on them for what ever reason.

Using the updater from the Plesk UI caused several problems - mostly in that the updater attempted to use up2date instead of YUM which was also installed on the system.

I contacted plesk to see if they could solve the problem and have the updater correctly use yum instead of up2date - thus allowing me to update the system.

here is their response:

The problem is caused by the up2date utility functioning. It works incorrectly with Plesk, tries to obsolete some needed packages. The problem was reported to our developers and fixed in the latest release.

For now please create the file /root/.autoinstallerrc with the following directive to avoid up2date using:
# cat /root/.autoinstallerrc
ALLOW_TO_USE_UP2DATE=NO

Then downloaded the latest autoinstaller (in root directory) and run the update. After successful upgrade please removed /root/.autoinstallerrc.

Once I did this and followed those instructions I was able to upgrade my system from 8.1.1 to 8.2.0 with out problems.

I should also note that it is a known issue that if your admin PW has a pound sign in it that it will also cause plesk updates to fail. I ran into that one before and had to remove plesk altogether on that machine due to a faulty upgrade that left plesk broken afterwards :s

Hope this helps some one.