How do I upgrade from RHEL 8.6 to RHEL 8.7 in offline method.

[NavinF]

Hi, 

I need to upgrade my existing RHEL 8.6 Virtual machine to RHEL 8.7.

However, due to security reasons I cannot expose my VM to the internet.

I do not have satellite and it will be a manual uggrade.

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

Hello @NavinF !

Refer this and see if this helps : https://access.redhat.com/solutions/29269 .

This should also work :

1. You need to have an online system as well from where you can download the RPM updates and then copy it over to the offline system.
2. Copy the RPM db in a tar file from the offline system to the online system using scp/rsync.
3. extract the contents of this tar file to a new directory in the online system.
4. Now download all the updates into this new directory in the online system using --downloadonly & --downloaddir option in the yum update command.
5. Now copy these updates to the offline system using scp / rsync .
6. Then do a  "yum localinstall <dir-with-updates-from-online-system>"

[EmanuelHaine]

Hi @NavinF 

Is it possible to configure your firewall for just accepting established connections? For example, you can allow the traffic from the VM to the Internet and not allow the traffic directly from the Internet, unless it was initiated from the VM.

[ipalagin · Accepted solution]

Just for 8.7 upgrade - download RHEL-8.7 full ISO, mount and upgrade.

[NavinF · Accepted solution]

I tried this method and it worked.

Following steps followed:

1] downloaded the iso from redhat site.

2] mounted the ISO on a local partion e.g. /mnt/ISO1

mount -t iso9660 -o loop /ISObackup/rhel-8.7-x86_64-dvd.iso /mnt/ISO1/

3] made a local repo in /etc/yum.repos.d

4] yum clean all

5] dnf repolist

6] yum upgrade

7] systemctl reboot

[EmanuelHaine]

@NavinF 

If you have a similar system with Internet access, you can do the following:

yum update --downloadonly --downloaddir=<dir>

cd <dir>

yum install *.rpm

I highly recomment you do it in a test environment before and also remember to take a snapshot before updating.