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Is there a way to effectively yum update to a specific point release in RHEL 5 and 6?

When a new point release is rolled out, the powers that be in my organisation put it through acceptance testing, which can take some time to complete - currently I've heard that the fairly newly released RHEL 6.7 breaks something to do with Veritas that a large proportion of the organisation uses and so we have not yet accepted it.

There are also times when we are building a server for a project and the project have already agreed that a vendor can have a specific version of RHEL (we seem to have a number of vendors that say their applications are only certified to run on specific versions).

The majority of our servers are virtualised (VMware) and are 'built' by deploying a pre-made/tested/QAd/approved template, then configured with the correct network settings/users/etc. - we note that there are better ways, and they are being explored and set through - ah hem- various acceptance testing...

We have a couple of mirror repo servers (one for 5, one for 6), but no Satellite.

So, if I have just deployed a VM which is sitting at RHEL 6.5 and I want to get to the latest accepted version of 6.6, is there anyway I can do this?

It seems that it should be easy, just install the package versions that comprise a specific release, but I can't find a way to easily do this, or even scrape a list and have it upgrade...

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    Related: serverfault: Update Red Hat Enterprise Linux's Packages Only To Specific Point Release – Mark Plotnick Aug 26 '15 at 15:12
  • Point releases are relevant only from the installation point of view, so people installing 5, don't have to download everything to obtain all upgrades, they just bundle them up an call it a point release. – Braiam Aug 26 '15 at 15:51
  • @MarkPlotnick that's very helpful, thank you. – forquare Aug 26 '15 at 16:05
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    @Braiam - yes, but if I've deployed 6.4 and I want to apply the latest accepted patches as specified by my organisation, then point release is important. Likewise if a vendor says "we only support our application on RHEL 6.5" and someone has already agreed to that, the vendor won't begin their installation until they have a RHEL 6.5 install. I understand it's ludicrous, but this is the situation I find myself in. – forquare Aug 26 '15 at 16:10
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Just to add to Mark's link; I recently had to upgrade to 6.6 (specifically). My method was:

yum --releasever=6.6 update
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Satellite is Red Hat's product for lifecycle management, configuration management, etc, and is more than capable of meeting your stated requirements: https://access.redhat.com/products/red-hat-satellite Why are you not using it?

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    We are not using it because whoever set up the environment several years ago decided we didn't require it/didn't know it existed. Since then we've had zero budget for supporting infrastructure. We are in the slow process of being merged with another part of the organisation that will allow us to use Satellite, however various reviews are still ongoing and access is not likely for some months. At this time it is out of my hands as a shop floor lackey, and I am merely trying to be as efficient as possible in delivering work with what I have to hand. – forquare Aug 26 '15 at 15:52
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    The link provided by Mark Plotnick is relevant. Other options include building a couple of VMs manually and creating internal "master" images for deployment in your virtual environment, or you could set up internal yum repos locked at different versions. The CentOS wiki has pretty detailed steps: wiki.centos.org/HowTos/CreateLocalMirror – Jesse K Aug 26 '15 at 16:00
  • Thanks for the link, that may prove very useful. I was hoping it wouldn't come to creating a VM for each release. – forquare Aug 26 '15 at 16:10
  • In case it's not clear, if using yum repos, you can just use different paths for the differently versioned repos. – Jesse K Aug 26 '15 at 17:14

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