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
======================================================================
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