HI,
I discovered today that when you use esxupdate to patch an ESX server through an ftp depot it downloads all the rpms in the /var/cache/yum/update directory and never cleans them up after applying them.
After applying most of the available patches /var grew by 100s of MB!
One of the main points of using a central patch depot is to keep one central copy of the patches.
Now for the interesting part:
I tried using 'yum clean all' and it failed with an error. It turns out that all the rpm files in the /var/cache/yum/update/patches directory had the infamous '\r' at the end of the name. Once I renamed these the 'yum clean all' worked.
The question then: where did the ^M's in the file names creep in from? The ftp server is on a Windows server, and the patching is done through an RDP script, but I have done this at another place and the ^M's were not there.
Note that the patching worked even with the '\r's in these file names.