With the recent GA announcements of RedHat 8.8 as well as its upstream alternatives Rocky Linux 8.8 and AlmaLinux 8.8 one can now finally update Linux offline!
With this enhancement, you can apply offline updates to RHEL by using the new yum offline-upgrade command.
There are times when you have too many services running on the system and many services that need stopping or restarting post the updates do not stop or restart within the timeout defined for the yum upgrade packages, which causes the yum upgrade command to fail.
The one easy solution for this is to reboot into the minimal mode, where only the most necessary services needed for Linux to run, will be running. This solution has been put to practice for the command yum offline-upgrade.
To fix this issue, you can simply run yum offline-upgrade download. On running this, yum will download all the package updates onto the system the usual way. Then you need to run yum offline-upgrade reboot. The system will now reboot into a minimal mode, install the updated packages that were downloaded earlier and then reboot back into the normal mode.
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