Archive for 'Linux Package Management'

Adding a new CentOS or Fedora CD or DVD image to a kickstart server

I’ve talked in the past about Yum repositories, and how you can create them. If you are using kickstart and want to import the contents of a CD for use by the installer, there are numerous ways you can tackle this issue. One of the easiest methods is to loopback mount the CDs or DVDs [...]

Finding orphaned RPMs on Linux hosts

If you use an RPM-based Linux distribution, you may have run into one or more cases were your system contains orphaned packages. An orphaned package is a package that doesn’t have any packages that depend on it, and in a number of cases the package is no longer required for the system to function correctly. [...]

Viewing the scripts that run when you install a Linux RPM

RPM packages contain the ability to run scripts after a package is added or removed. These scripts can perform actions like adding or removing users, cleaning up temporary files, or checking to make sure a software component that is contained within a package isn’t running. To view the contents of the scripts that will be [...]

Configuring yum to use an HTTP or FTP proxy

I have been experimenting with squid at home, and recently configured yum to use the squid proxy server I set up. There are two ways you can get yum to use an HTTP or FTP proxy. First, you can make yum use a proxy for a single session by setting the http_proxy and ftp_proxy environment [...]

Adding 3rd party package repositories to CentOS Linux

As a long time CentOS user, I have grown accustomed to firing up yum to install my favorite packages. Periodically a package I’m looking for isn’t available, and I need to go out to a 3rd party repository to snag it. One awesome source for 3rd party repositories is the repositories section of the CentOS [...]

Dealing with yum checksum errors

I support a couple of yum repositories, and use the yum repository build instructions documented in my previous post to create my repositories. When I tried to apply the latest CentOS 5.3 updates to one of my servers last week, I noticed that I was getting a number of “Error performing checksum” errors: $ yum [...]

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