Red Hat

Hi,

I've found that YUM is not installed on all RHEL 4, 5, 6 servers in this client site. What could be the particular reasons designing systems like this? wget is installed.

Thank you in advance!

did you check the absolute path to see if its there?

i can't remember what it is path it is

Code:

/usr/bin

or

Code:

 /usr/sbin

I've heard in some places it was a security issue because installs files automatically pull pre-reque's and some need to be determined by audit teams prior to installing. you can always find the RPM. You may want to check with your security team before enabling it.

My guess is they did not use an engineered build, but had individuals build servers ad hoc. You get inconsistencies that way.

It's a decent site with Red Hat support. No yum package installed.

Code:

# rpm -qa | grep yum
#

I'll ask them why. Thanks.

If you get the answer from your client, could you share the same with us? I'm also curious to know the reason. It's very unlikely that you would not have yum, unless you have an alternative package management system in place.

Also, I don't think yum has security issues if the repository is protected and gpg checking is in place.

We do not install yum on servers. We have a tested and approved build. We want that build and only that build installed on our servers. And we want all servers to have the same build. There is no repository available to our servers and without a repository yum is mostly useless. We do install rpm (the program). And once in a while we are forced to install a new rpm on all of the servers.

We have a RedHat 5 Server build, a RedHat 6 Server Build, and so on. We have just finished upgrading everything to RedHat 6. Once RedHat 7 hits the streets, we will test it and develop a standard build for RedHat 7. And then we will go around and update all of our servers again.

Some of these systems are on isolated networks. Some are in scif's. Most are behind firewall on our general internal network. 6 are on the Internet as DNS and NTP servers.

I agree with the general philosophy of this. I would install yum anyway. I do fight for more of the OS to be installed with each update. We have no telnet client installed! I don't like telnet, but the client is useful for troubleshooting. This is my current fight. However yum is pretty far down on the list.

Why are you guys so freaked out over the loss of yum?

In my case, there are dedicated yum repository servers which contain enough packages for fresh install, update and patching. Some packages can be installed without any additional approval process and some are only available through a change request. These servers are highly logged for each package transaction. This is same for Solaris IPS repository servers in our network as well.

Advantage of having package management system is that you do not have to carry around the package (along with numerous dependencies) by FTP/SCP-ing every time you need them to be installed. Of course, the packages available in the repository have to be selected carefully.

Very true especially when you need to be sure if certain port is open on a remote box and you do not have access to nmap.