On 11/28/05, Jerry W. Hubbard hubbardjw@charter.net wrote:
For the original search on my, I did an updatedb and used the locate lsdev command. I also tried find and whereis lsdev. After some research this weekend it was apparent the procinfo and socklist commands did not work either. Your answer explains why.
As you saw, the locate, find, and whereis commands only find files on your system. The advantage of using "yum provides lsdev" is that it checks all packages available for installation.
I was also interested in why it was not included, hence the Google search. It appears Linux may be more secure without it. I did not find a clear explanation why. My guess is the system calls made by the procinfo package. I'm not a programmer. If I were, I would review the source code.
I'm not always clear on why Red Hat does or doesn't include a particular package. They support each release of RHEL for 5 years, and all software in RHEL has to be "enterprise-ready", whatever that means, so if a particular package isn't enterprise-ready or would be too burdensome to support at a particular version for 5 years, then it may not get included. That's probably why procinfo was omitted. It's included in RHEL 2.1 and in Fedora, so I doubt that it's particular insecure.
You can occasionally find the reasons for a package getting dropped by checking http://bugzilla.redhat.com/, if someone reports the missing package as a bug/RFE there.
I suspected it was not provided in RHEL, just haven't found a way to prove it without help.
It is not provided in RHEL. If it were, then "yum provides lsdev" on a CentOS box should find it, since CentOS aims to provide the same packages as RHEL.
Does Red Hat provide a site that list the included packages? Is it in the Red Hat Doc? I was looking for the lsdev package also, not procinfo. Still allot to learn.
The lsdev command is part of the procinfo package. To see this on a Fedora box:
0 pccomp9:/home/josh: > rpm -qf /usr/bin/lsdev procinfo-18-16 0 pccomp9:/home/josh: >
If you have a RHN subscription, you can get search included packages there. Otherwise, your easiest bet is probably to pick the CentOS mirror of your choice and scan the list of packages there.
Hope this helps.
Josh Kelley