Petr’s blog about Linux

Sometimes you have a RHEL/CentOS server which is not connected to the Internet. But you should also install security update to prevent local hackers to mess up your system.

I was not able to find some nice description how to do it. Some people are using proxies – but then you still need some connection to the proxy – which can not be the case.

Here is my way how I did it….

Let’s say there is a server which is offline and doesn’t have any connection to the Internet.
Then we need station (or laptop / virtual machine), which has the same OS as server and is connected to the Internet.

Copy the /var/lib/rpm to the station (you can use USB/CD…)

Install the download only plugin for yum:

Backup the original rpm directory on the station and replace it with the rpm directory from the server:

Download updates to /tmp/rpm_updates and return back the /var/lib/rpm

Transfer the downloaded rpms to the server and update:

…and the server is updated
This is probably not the best way how to do it, but it’s working for me.