[WBEL-users] amusing anecdote

[Tom Cooper]

Sorry to flood your inboxes this morning, but I guess I've got some 
pent-up need for communications.  I suspect that the flow of mail from 
me will dry up a bit after this.

I've been working on a design of a patch process for RH ES at <insert 
Fortune 500 company name here> and was unable to get funding for setting 
up the test boxes in the lab.  Of course, in time this problem will go 
away, but our business problem exists RIGHT NOW!

Thankfully I stumbled across the WBEL project, and built some lab boxes 
quickly.  We developed our patch application/removal/backout process by 
applying RedHat updates to those boxes.  (The patch process uses 
proprietary software, so I can't offer it to anyone here.  Sorry.)

Eventually we broke one of the boxes.  REALLY broke it.  The RPM 
database was corrupt.  I fugured that it was because we had applied, 
removed, and re-applied RH patches to WBEL dozens of times, and it was 
too much.  We rebuilt the box and continued our testing.

The other day I was notified by the Linux engineering team that they had 
an urgent need to deploy a RedHat patch to their production boxes.  
Apparently there's an RPM bug that causes the rpm database to be munged!

It seems that this problem is unrelated to the WBEL build after all! 

John, you may be interested to know that we've had excellent results 
applying RHES binary patches to WBEL boxes .

This should be the last message from me for a while.  I've got to go do 
some actual work!

Regards,
Tom Cooper