SME Server:Documentation:Technical Manual:Chapter6

Chapter 6. Adding new software

New software can be either any Red Hat EL4 rpm available in enabled repositories or SME specific software called contribs for historical reasons that can be a standalone package or provides support code for a generic EL4 package.

Packages available

Current rpms in the SME Contribs section

Installing software

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.

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 dansguardian

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.

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 you can have a look at the [Developers Guide]. After adding or modifying the yum_repositories database you will have to make sure you regenerate the configuration file using the following command:

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 - don't fetch these rpms IncludePkgs - only fetch these rpms

3rd-Party Yum Repositories setup

This page once started as http://no.longer.valid/phpwiki/index.php/3rdPartyYumRepositories, but a newer list of repositories for SME Server is now located 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. They are also set up to block you from installing RPMs that exist already in SME Server 7.0.

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

 expand-template /etc/yum.conf

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 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 dud 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

Output is
<snip>
Migrating existing database yum_available
Migrating existing database yum_installed
Creating database yum_repositories and setting defaults

[root@kiwi db]# ls -la yum_repositories*
-rw-r----- 1 root admin 3207 Apr 9 00:13 yum_repositories
-rw-r----- 1 root admin 4837 Apr 7 19:01 yum_repositories.po

this shows i had other repo's setup
but now have a clean set of db values

expand-template /etc/yum.conf

and check

yum update

Using RPMs

Since SME Server is based on CentOS, the preferred way to install software is with yum, a lot of you might be familiar with its predecessor rpm. To install an RPM already on your system you can also use yum to install:

yum localinstall /path/to/filename.rpm

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

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