I too am mostly a Debian guy but it sounds like your situation has less to do with RPM than it does with a client putting themselves in a crazy situation. The

I too am mostly a Debian guy but it sounds like your situation has less to do with RPM than it does with a client putting themselves in a crazy situation. The whole point of getting your OS from RH is that RH has a book that you can do things by and be pretty well assured of the results. When they decided to no longer subscribe to that they really should have switched to a community managed Linux version. I can't imagine the one time cost of moving their production servers to CentOS would be more than the continual update pains they're experiencing.