SME Server:Documentation:Technical Manual:Chapter6

Adding new software

New software should be installed from RPMs
Red Hat or Centos Version .el4 rpms should be compatible for SME7, use .el5 for SME8 and .el6 for SME9.
Often these rpms are configured with a SME Server integration rpm.

Packages available

User contributed documentation is located in Category:Contrib.

Packages are available in the smecontribs repository or other individuals repositories.

Installing software

Server Manager

SME Server has an option to install software using the Software Installer option in the server-manager, after enabling 'Manage Individual Packages' you can install rpms from enabled repositories and if you know exactly what you are doing, you can also remove rpms.

From SME Server 7.2 you can restrict the software that is shown in the 'Software Installer' - 'Available packages' dialog. Use this to hide software that you don't want: eg desktop software such as openoffice from the centos repositories.

At a command line as root you can allow one or more terms that are contained in the repository name

config setprop yum RestrictRepo sme,dungog

Or one or more terms that are contained in the rpm name

config setprop yum RestrictRpm perl

If you add both these examples only rpms with perl in their name and are in any of the enabled sme or dungog repositories will be visible.

yum_update_dbs 

to update the database, ignore the messages.

Command Line

SME Server uses yum to install software, this is a newer and improved version of the well-known rpm command. Yum makes use of so-called repositories in which a lot of pacakges (RPMs) are stored. The big advantage of yum over rpm is that it can not only determine it's own dependencies, but if can also download required dependencies from enabled repositories. With everyone having yum repositories set up the same way, Howto authors can now use instructions like:

yum --enablerepo=dag install packagename

Localinstall

To install an RPM already on your system you can also use yum to install:

yum localinstall /path/to/packagename.rpm

To satisfy dependencies you can enable or disable other repositories using the --enablerepo=xxx or the --disablerepo=xxx option.

	Note:
	Using yum will run other actions such as updating server-manager menus, that rpm -Uvh will not!

Yum Repositories

Yum repositories on SME Server are to be configured by the internal configuration database. Repositories are stored in the yum_repositories database. The yum configuration file, located at /etc/yum.conf holds the actual configuration and is generated using the data in the yum_repositories database.

Checking status of installed repositories

To check which repositories are installed and their status do

/sbin/e-smith/audittools/repositories

On an unmodified sme server only the following are enabled

base: enabled

smeaddons: enabled

smeextras: enabled

smeos: enabled

smeupdates: enabled

updates: enabled

Any other repository that is installed and listed should have a status of disabled. This is to prevent the inadvertant and potentially undesirable update of packages. To update packages from other repos, use the --enablerepo=reponame switch in the yum update command eg

yum update --enablerepo=dag

which will also bring in any rpm updates from the dag repo (only for packages that are already installed on your system). See more details below.

Installing or modifying a repository

For the syntax of modifying or adding see the examples below in the 3rd-Party Yum Repositories setup section. For more details on the configuration database and how to work with it see the [SME_Server:Documentation SME Server Developer's Guide]. After adding or modifying the yum_repositories database you will have to make sure you regenerate the configuration file using the following command:

signal-event yum-modify

Options for the yum_repositories database

The repositories for SME Server are configured using the internal yum-repositories configuration database. There are several options that can be set for every repository:

• Visible yes|no - yes displays in server manager
• status enabled|disabled - disabled are ignored unless specified with --enablerepo=
• Exclude=xxx,yyy - don't fetch these rpms
• IncludePkgs=xxx,yyy - only fetch these rpms

3rd-Party Yum Repositories setup

A list of repositories for SME Server is available in Category:Yum Repository.

If you use the commands below to add 3rd party yum repositories, they will be added to the yum-repositories database, but not enabled by default, so this will not affect automatic yum upgrades. It only adds options for running yum manually.

To reflect the changes in the database you will have to regenerate the yum.conf file:

 signal-event yum-modify

	Warning:
	Be sure to never set the status of one of these repositories to enabled as this imposes the risk of installing newer versions SME Server core packages which might break your server. If you want to install software from them you can enable them using the SME Server shell and the yum option --enablerepo=reponame.

Below are a few repositories, for which the configuration can be copied to the SME Server shell to install them on your server. The lines are long, but it so you can cut and paste into your ssh client. Also note you shouldn't enable these repositories, they should just be used at the command line with "yum install", and not with "yum upgrade".

If a site has a RPM-GPG-KEY you have to install it first with a line such as.

rpm --import http://dag.wieers.com/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt

Restoring Default Yum Repositories

If you have problems with your yum setup you may have entered incorrect repository values

Remove the current values and restore the original setting with these commands

cd /home/e-smith/db/
mv yum_repositories yum_repositories.po
/etc/e-smith/events/actions/initialize-default-databases

Now you have a clean install, you can re-add 3rd party repos as described above

signal-event yum-modify

and check

yum update