I dunno about you, but I find Redhat Fedora's up2date feature a bit unreliable. I mean, it basically works, but seems to hang on downloads quite frequently. It seems that certain times of day are better than others, but it's pretty much impossible to update a new system without quite a lot of messing around. I have a "solution"...
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I've written a small Perl program, which starts up2date and watches it's output. If it doesn't say anything for 15 minutes it kills it and restarts it. up2date.pl (1k file)
It turns out that up2date realises it's piping to a program, so doesn't output progress bars. This means there's no way to know if a download is working or not, so I just cranked up the timeout to something that would pretty much be okay. It means it'll probably sit there for 15 minutes a few times, but it will recover and will sort itself out. If nothing else, you can leave up2date.pl running overnight or something and it'll chew away at the work it has to do until it's done.
(A little idea I had, presented to you by the gift of Rant:)
I think Redhat should just make ISO images of the updates directory periodically. They can then put these on the Bit Torrent, and call them "service packs" or some such. If you install a system from scratch, there are bound to be loads of updates required. This could save you a shed load of downloading. Once you've got all of those installed, just do a normal up2date to finish the job. Ideal if you install more than one system, or do an install quite a while after the OS you're using got released. Now where do I suggest such a thing so that Redhat start doing it...?
Meanwhile, I'm going to burn a copy of /var/spool/up2date to a CD and use that for the next system I install. Should save quite a bit of time (if you want to do the same, remember to turn "KeepAfterInstall" to "Yes" in up2date --config).