Paul Johnson wrote:
I have a lab of Fedora systems and a server that supplies RPM
updates & yum daily update works OK.
Now I have 2 administration problems.
1. How can I have RPMS on the server be automatically INSTALLED,
rather than updated? Suppose I learn of a new program that is not
presently installed, and I want it "pushed out" to the workstations.
?
My first thought is to create a meta-package that requires all the
packages you want and have that installed on all your lab systems.
When you find a new package you want to add to the systems, update the
meta-package requires. Then the next time one of the lab systems does
an update it will install the new packages as dependencies.
2. On my systems, I have various files that are customized for our
site, such as /etc/hosts.deny and /etc/hosts.allow and some login
stuff such as /etc/pam.d/system-auth or gdm/PreSession and so forth.
If I want to customize those things, I currently use SSH to just
copy around to all machines. However, now there are some machines
that dual boot, and so I can't copy the files in there when the
users are not in Linux, and I'd like to have the yum system update
them when the PCs turn on. Aside from creating an RPM called
"MySite" and putting each and every individual config file into it,
and then putting an update of it on the server, I don't know what to
do.
3. Sometimes the files I want to update or customize confict with an
existing package. I've not tried it, but I'm afraid that if I try to
run my MySite rpm update, then there will be a conflict with
whatever package currently owns /etc/hosts.deny or
/etc/pam.d/system-auth. See what I mean? How to replace via yum
(which rejects conflicts and stops). Or for another example,
consider a package that supplies a bad file, such as the bad Acrobat
pdf reader line that does not work under FC6. The acroread script
can be patched to work.
Hmmm, I'm sure there's a better way but it's not dawning on me at the
moment. So the idea I have, which is surely not the best one, is to
add your customizations to the config files via the %post section in
your MySite package. You could create a script that did the
customizations and call it in %post or you could just do them directly
in %post, depending on how many things you needed to tweak.
As I write this question, I realize that I could address it by
simply rebuilding RPMS for any packages in which I want to customize
files. However, when Fedora issues updates, my customizations may
be lost (depending on whether they are polite and leave *.rpmnew or
*.rpmsave files.
Yeah, that gets unweildy if you are customizing a lot of stock
packages. But if you have a repository for your custom packages you
can use the yum-protectbase plugin to lock your systems in to your
repository versions. It doesn't help with how often you may need to
rebuild packages as they are updated from core/extras though.
--
Todd OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL:
www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
======================================================================
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent
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-- John F. Kennedy, 1962