CentOS - Jan 2008 - LIMITING NUMBER OF KERNEL VERSIONS RETAINED

Hi

Some time ago there was a discussion on the above subject. I have 
scanned the past few month's mailing list archives and cannot find the 
relevant mail(s).

Could somebody please repost the solution or point me at the correct 
resource.

I would also appreciate advice on how to do this on a RHEL4 server being 
updated with up2date.

Is it safe just to delete the old kernel and initrd files from the boot 
partition and the grub conf file?

TIA

ChrisG

> Subject: [CentOS] LIMITING NUMBER OF KERNEL VERSIONS RETAINED
> 
> Hi
> 
> Some time ago there was a discussion on the above subject. I have
> scanned the past few month's mailing list archives and cannot find the
> relevant mail(s).
> 
> Could somebody please repost the solution or point me at the correct
> resource.
> 
> I would also appreciate advice on how to do this on a RHEL4 server being
> updated with up2date.
> 
> Is it safe just to delete the old kernel and initrd files from the boot
> partition and the grub conf file?
> 
> TIA
> 
> ChrisG
Chris

I dunno answer to limit kernels retained.

No, simple deletion is not a good idea.

What we do is this

rpm -qa | grep kernel

Then we use yum to remove the ones we do not need

yum remove kernel-whatever-version-etc

and/or other items as necessary

 - rh

> Some time ago there was a discussion on the above subject. I have  
> scanned the past few month's mailing list archives and cannot find  
> the relevant mail(s).
>
> Could somebody please repost the solution or point me at the  
> correct resource.
What you want is:

   # yum instal yum-utils

followed by:

   # package-cleanup --oldkernels [--count=x]

where x defaults to "2" (i.e., keep two older kernels).

Alfred

> Could somebody please repost the solution or point me at the correct 
> resource.
> 
> I would also appreciate advice on how to do this on a RHEL4 server being 
> updated with up2date.
> 
> Is it safe just to delete the old kernel and initrd files from the boot 
> partition and the grub conf file?
Unless you are really hurting for disk space on your boot partition, it 
is safe to leave the extra kernel images there.  If the clutter on your 
grub menu bothers you, you can simply delete them from the grub.conf 
file so they don't show up.  I generally keep 2-3 older kernel images 
around just in case newly installed ones won't boot for some reason.

Alfred gave some good advice for keeping this neat 'n tidy with the 
yum-utils package-cleanup command.

Chris Geldenhuis napsal(a):
> Hi
> 
> Some time ago there was a discussion on the above subject. I have 
> scanned the past few month's mailing list archives and cannot find the 
> relevant mail(s).
> 
> Could somebody please repost the solution or point me at the correct 
> resource.
> 
> I would also appreciate advice on how to do this on a RHEL4 server being 
> updated with up2date.
> 
> Is it safe just to delete the old kernel and initrd files from the boot 
> partition and the grub conf file?
> 
> TIA
> 
> ChrisG
Hi,
I use this within my kikstart scripts:
if [ $(rpm -q kernel | wc -l) -gt 1 ]; then rpm -e $(rpm -q kernel | sed 
'$d'); fi
if [ $(rpm -q kernel-smp | wc -l) -gt 1 ]; then rpm -e $(rpm -q 
kernel-smp | sed '$d'); fi

David Hrb??