If you are running Red Hat, you need to keep your RPMs up to date. Red Hat has a service you can subscribe to, but if you wish to do this manually, browse to the house of mirrors, and pick a site that has updates for your architecture. We put all of the updates in one directory, and then run:

for i in *.rpm
do
rpm -Fvh --nodeps $i
done

The F option means you want to “Freshen” existing packages. The v and h options just show you what is going on as it happens. The –nodeps option shouldn’t have to be necessary, but it is in our experience. You might want to have an identically configured test box you try this on before you go munching a bunch of files on your production server. 🙂 If something does go wrong, you can see exactly what the RPM install process did that might have caused the problem:

rpm -q --scripts rpmname

If you want to find out the exact name of an RPM, you could use:

rpm -qa | grep namepart

where namepart is something like php or ldap, etc.

If you want to find if an RPM has modified, say php.ini, you could use:

rpm -qa --scripts | grep php.ini