I've scheduled some things for install using the red hat network, and when the daemon gets round to contacting it (seems to be every 2 hrs) they'll install. But there seems to be no way for me to force up2date to install ones I've scheduled - do I have to be patient for 2 hrs, or is there a way to do what I want?

PS. Am i missing something or does rhn not have any ftp server packages to download?

I've never gotten RHN to work for me, so I'm not sure if this is an exact answer for your question, but I can usually "force" updates to occur simply by typing "up2date" as root in a terminal window. The up2date program will immediately download and install any updates it can find for packages I have installed on my system.

You can even have up2date update specific packages by typing, for example "up2date foo" to get the latest version of the foo package. This is useful if you want to get the latest version of a packagage that isn't even installed on your system yet (by default, up2date won't "update" a package that it doesn't detect on your system.)

You can read more command line options by typing in "man up2date".