[CentOS] i386 packages on x64 servers

[Akemi Yagi]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 1:29 PM, German Andres Pulido Franco
<gpulido at gtscolombia.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I have some servers, all running centos 5.2 x64 with current updates. None of
> the servers has installed packages that are not part of the centos regular
> packages. They were installed using the "server" packages at install,
> therefore there is no X server, GNOME, KDE or any other non-server stuff.
> However, I recently noted that the servers have the x64 _and_ the i386
> versions of some packages installed, for instance: krb5-libs-1.6.1-25.el5_2.1
> and pam_krb5-2.2.14-1.el5_2.1. My question is: If I have no 32 bits software
> installed on these machines, why are such libraries installed? and can they be
> safely removed from the servers?

There is a known issue with yum.  See, for example,

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2008-June/002961.html
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-July/060236.html

At any rate, you want to remove all *.i?86 packages and then add this line:

exclude=*.i386 *.i686

in /etc/yum.conf to maintain a pure 64-bit system.

Akemi