On Fri, 2005-07-15 at 18:33 +0100, Lee W wrote:

dan1 wrote:

...

Hello.

I have installed CentOS 4 on a server in a hosting company and I realise that not all packages have been installed. I would like to install all packages exactly like it is when we click on 'install everything' from the CentOS 4 installation. Is there a way of doing so with 'yum install' something ? My goal is to have the exact replicate as the default CentOS 4 'install everything' option. I am in fear that there would be other packages installed than only the ones from the default CentOS install by typing 'yum install *' if this is possible.

Thanks, Daniel

Hi Daniel,

If the server has the DVD in the drive could you not simply do:-

rpm -Uvh *.rpm

That sounds like the same problem as running 'yum install *' only worse. Would certainly run into problems with kernels and glibc i386/i686 versions with this approach.

If you have access to a clean "everything" install do

# rpm -qa | sort > all_rpms

On the hosted machine do

# rpm -qa | sort > installed_rpms

Doing

# diff all_rpms installed_rpms > needed_rpms

will tell you the packages you need. Will take a bit of editing and/or filter magic on the diff output to get rid of "garbage" (should be "< ") characters. Then do

# yum install `cat needed_rpms`

Phil

On Fri, 2005-07-15 at 12:54, Ugo Bellavance wrote:

...

I have installed CentOS 4 on a server in a hosting company and I realise that not all packages have been installed. I would like to install all packages exactly like it is when we click on 'install everything' from the CentOS 4 installation. Is there a way of doing so with 'yum install' something ? My goal is to have the exact replicate as the default CentOS 4 'install everything' option. I am in fear that there would be other packages installed than only the ones from the default CentOS install by typing 'yum install *' if this is possible.

I personnaly wonder why one would want to have all packages installed on a remote server. You really need all the X applications?

I agree with this. I'll do an 'everything' install on a local box just in case I might want something unusual but on a remote server it ends up causing more trouble than it is worth. Remember that you'll want to use 'yum update' frequently to keep up with security and bugfix updates and every additional installed package has a chance of adding to the time it takes to update and the odds that something will go wrong. You might want X installed so you can remotely run the GUI versions of system-config-... but it would be unusual to need the full gnome/kde desktops. Can you start with a 'server' install and add packages as you know you need them?

Hi Daniel,

I think Phil has already identified a few issues with my "simple" solution. The advantage of running rpm rather than yum is that you will be taking the data from the CD/DVD rather than off the mirrors, thus not using your or the mirrors bandwidth. Of course you could configure a local repo in yum to do exactly the same thing for the base install and then just get the updates from the mirrors.

Also, I would second (or third, I've lost count) the question as to why you need to all packages installed. Using Yum would resolve dependancy problems automatically, also going back to my original post rpm usually tells you was is missing and suggest what needs to be installed.

See ya

Lee

Hi all.

Thanks for all your explanations on how to try reaching this state of everything installed. There are some good ideas. I will see which one to take. Maybe the best would just to do a complete reinstall to make sure all is there like it should and nothing has mixed up as it seems not so easy and reliable to accomplish this task.

For the curious, I definitely need some packages of X for running Java servlets that uses it, some fonts packages, and quite a lot of things. I highly prefer having it that way. You are all right that I could choose all packages one after the other as soon as I need one. however sometimes I don't know what package I should install to have this or that config file and I wouldn't like to loose time due to that. Also I'm happy with all of it installed, with a yum cron job that makes the job of the updates very well...

Again thanks to all.

Regards, Daniel

On Sat, 2005-07-16 at 12:46 +0200, dan1 wrote:

Hello.

I come back regarding my problem of the 'install everything' yum install command to upgrade from a 'server' install to a 'everything' install of CentOS 4, for the follow-up.

My DC technician told me to do the following:

yum grouplist

and then

yum groupinstall group_choosen

This seems quite a good thing. However, it lacks a 'distro_everything' group that would allow us to instal directly all packages of the distro. We must type each group manually and it's a pain. That would be a must. Maybe it is something to add to the yum functionnality ? Or else to make several top level groups that contain almost everything ?

Regards, Daniel

Daniel, Installing everything on a remote server is NOT a good idea. You are opening up your server to vulnerabilities and causing things to run in memory that you have no use for.

You are also putting every tool that a bad guy would need already on your server, so he can do just about anything he wants if he gets access.

It is, of course, your server ... so if you want to install everything, that is up to you.

There is no "install everything" option in yum groupinstall. The yum group features use the same comps.xml file as the anaconda installer, so we won't change it. (yum uses it differently ... and there is no "install everything")

If you haven't done any upgrades or added any software outside the distro, you might be able to use:

system-config-packages

(if you have run yum or up2date to update the system, system-config- packages will no longer work)

yum groupinstall group_choosen

This seems quite a good thing. However, it lacks a 'distro_everything' group that would allow us to instal directly all packages of the distro. We must type each group manually and it's a pain. That would be a must. Maybe it is something to add to the yum functionnality ? Or else to make several top level groups that contain almost everything ?

how about:

yum grouplist | sed -n "s/^ //p" | while read i; do echo yum -y groupinstall ""$i""; done

and then execute that...?

or even directly

yum grouplist | sed -n "s/^ //p" | while read i; do yum -y groupinstall "$i"; done

Cheers, MaZe.