A fellow Racker showed me httpry about five years ago and I’ve had in my toolbox as a handy way to watch HTTP traffic. I’d used some crazy tcpdump arguments and some bash one-liners to pull out the information I needed but I never could get the live look that I really wanted. Here’s an example of what httpry’s output looks like on a busy site like icanhazip.com: GET icanhazip.

Scientific Linux installations have a package called yum-autoupdate by default and the package contains two files:

rpm -ql yum-autoupdate /etc/cron.daily/yum-autoupdate /etc/sysconfig/yum-autoupdate The cron job contains the entire script to run automatic updates once a day and the configuration file controls its behavior. However, you can’t get the same functionality as Fedora’s yum-updatesd package where you can receive notifications for updates rather than automatically updating the packages.

To get those notifications in Scientific Linux, just make two small edits to this portion of /etc/cron.

When you install Scientific Linux, it will keep you on the same point release that you installed. For example, if you install it from a 6.0 DVD, you’ll stay on 6.0 and get security releases for that point release only. Getting it to behave like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS is a painless process. Just install the sl6x repository with yum: yum install yum-conf-sl6x Check to ensure that you’re getting updates from the new repository:

Before we get started, I really ought to drop this here: This begs the question: When should you use another method to upgrade Fedora? What other methods are there? You have a few other methods to get the upgrade done: Toss in a CD or DVD: You can upgrade via the anaconda installer provided on the CD, DVD or netinstall media. My experiences with this method for Fedora (as well as CentOS, Scientific Linux, and Red Hat) haven’t been too positive, but your results may vary.