[CentOS] placing x11 libraries in an alternate location

Tue Sep 18 04:12:25 UTC 2012
Kahlil Hodgson <kahlil.hodgson at dealmax.com.au>

On 16/09/12 22:29, Rita wrote:
> we have close to 50 servers. I would like to have X11 libraries (and
> devel). Instead of installing them one by one on all servers, I would like
> to have them in a central NFS location and have my app pick them up like
> that. Is it possible to do this with yum/rpm ?

I've done this before on Solaris and regretted it.  Worked well to start 
with, but turned into a World Of Pain.

It might be technically possible, if the RPMs  are relocatable, or you 
did something cute with soft-links, but it will take a fair bit of 
mucking around, and will probably cause you bigger and harder to solve 
problems later on. Think about upgrading :-(

Might I suggest and alternative question: "How do I easily install and 
maintain X11 libraries on 50+ servers?".

Puppet, Chef, or Bcfg2 could do it but it will probably take you a long 
time to get your head around those beasts, let alone setting up the 
infrastructure.

A much simpler solution is ansible: http://ansible.github.com/.

Very easy to learn. Very easy to use. You can read _all_ the docs in 
under an hour. You should be able to set it up in a few minutes.

The following will ensure the latest version of xorg (and any 
dependencies) is installed on all my servers (updating/installing 10 at 
a time).

#>  ansible all -m yum name=xorg state=latest -f 10

It can do a lot more, but that should solve your immediate problem.

Hope this helps,

Kal
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