Knowledge Base

Symptoms

During initialization, esxupdate tries to read /etc/yum.conf and then write additional options to it. When /etc/yum.conf is opened for writing, it gets truncated, and the write process does not get completed due to disk space restrictions. This results in an empty file. An error message similar to the following might be displayed in /var/log/vmware/esxupdate.log :

ERROR: yum not installed or yum.conf missing - please reinstall yum and retry

Deployment Considerations

Download Instructions

Download and verify the patch bundle as follows :

1.      Download patch ESX-1003175 from http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches.html .

2.      Log in to the ESX Server service console as root.

3.      Create a local depot directory.

# mkdir -p /var/updates

Note: VMware recommends that you use the updates directory.

4.      Change your working directory to /var/updates.

# cd /var/updates

5.      Download the tar file into the /var/updates directory.

7.      Extract the compressed tar archive:

# tar -xvzf ESX-1003175.tgz

8.      Change to the newly created directory, /var/updates/ESX-1003175:

# cd ESX-1003175

Installation Instructions

After you download and extract the archive, and if you are in the directory that you previously created, use the following command to install the update:

# esxupdate update

To run esxupdate from a different directory, you must specify the bundle path in the command:

# esxupdate -r file://<directory>/ESX-1003175 update

For example, if the host is called depot:

# esxupdate -r file:///depot/var/updates/ESX-1003175 update

During the update process, logs appear on the terminal. You can specify the verbosity of esxupdate logs by using the -v option as shown below.

# esxupdate -v 10 file://<directory>/ESX-1003175 update

For more information how to use esxupdate, see the Patch Management for ESX Server 3 tech note at http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_esxupdate.pdf .