Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

Why to use: Many times while installing Database on Linux/Linux most of us encounters problems with the pre-installations which requires some of the Packages to be available to Oracle before the installation starts.  Searching required RPM’s online is a tedious job and needs lot of patience which could ultimately lead to errors about “Dependencies Failed”.  A best resolution of this problem is YUM, which resolves dependency part by itself  and allow the package search and install easily from the repository created.

The Yellow dog Updater Modified (YUM) is a package management application for computers running Linux operating systems. yum is a standard method of managing the installation and removal of software.

Steps to Configure YUM Repository on RED HAT:

1) Install vsftpd (FTP Server) & createrepo Packages
Insert RHEL 5 Installation DVD

# mkdir ~/Desktop/rhel_cd
# mount /dev/cdrom ~/Desktop/rhel_cd
# cd ~/Desktop/rhel_cd/Server
# rpm –ivh vsftpd*
# rpm –ivh createrepo*

2) Copy all packages from DVD to LINUX filesystem

# cp ~/Desktop/rhel_cd/Server/ /var/ftp/pub
# cd /
# eject

3) Configure Local Yum Repository Server

# cd /var/ftp/pub/Server/repodata
# cp comps-rhel5-server-core.xml /var/ftp/pub/Server/
# cd /var/ftp/pub/Server
# createrepo -vg comps-rhel5-server-core.xml /var/ftp/pub/Server/
# service vsftpd start
# chkconfig –add vsftpd

4) Configure Clients
Run following commands on clients

# vi /etc/yum.repos.d/yum_server.repo

Add:
[Server]
name=YUM_SERVER
baseurl=ftp://192.168.2.100/pub/Server
gpgcheck=0

# vi /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf

Set the following parameter (if not already set)
anonymous_enable = yes

# service vsftpd restart

Now your clients can use this yum server to download & install packages & resolve
dependencies.