ServerBuddies Support Blog

How do I install or upgrade an RPM package?

In order to install an RPM package you must first have the RPM you are trying to install on your system. Many people will download RPMs from a website and of course, Red Hat Network (RHN) provides all the RPM packages included in the distributions. There are two main flags that are used to install or upgrade RPM packages:

-i is used to install a new package. Always use this for kernel installations and upgrades.
-U is used to upgrade an RPM package but will also install a package if it does not exist in the RPM database.

Usage and additional options can be found in the RPM man page. Type man rpm from the command line.

Here is some information about the -i and -U flags:

INSTALL AND UPGRADE OPTIONS

Set up yum to get updates for RHEL5 system

To use the Red Hat repositories, make sure that you have installed the following package:

and that you have registered your system against RHN:

if you use a proxy, remember to specify it in the network configuration part of the assistant.

To manually set the proxy, fill /etc/sysconfig/up2date :

If the proxy requires authentication, also set these values :

All yum options are detailed in:

To check that your machine is registered, run:

Using smartctl to get information about your Hard Disk

smartctl controls the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) system built into any ATA-3 and later ATA, IDE and SCSI-3 hard drives. The purpose of SMART is to monitor the reliability of the hard drive and predict drive failures, and to carry out different types of drive self-tests. This version of smartctl is compatible with ATA/ATAPI-7 and earlier standards

EXAMPLES

Print all SMART information for drive /dev/hda (Primary Master).

Disable SMART on drive /dev/hdd (Secondary Slave).

Using the excellent access control features of Squid, you may configure use of Internet services proxied by Squid to be available only during normal business hours. For example, we’ll illustrate access by employees of a business which is operating between 9:00AM and 5:00PM, Monday through Friday, and which uses the 10.1.42.0/42 subnetwork:

Add the following to the bottom of the ACL section of your /etc/squid/squid.conf file:

Then, add the following to the top of the http_access section of your /etc/squid/squid.conf file:

Channel Bonding Interfaces

Linux allows administrators to bind multiple network interfaces together into a single channel using the bonding kernel module and a special network interface called a channel bonding interface. Channel bonding enables two or more network interfaces to act as one, simultaneously increasing the bandwidth and providing redundancy.

To create a channel bonding interface, create a file in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ directory called ifcfg-bond[N], replacing [N] with the number for the interface, such as 0.

The contents of the file can be identical to whatever type of interface that is getting bonded, such as an Ethernet interface. The only difference is that the DEVICE= directive must be bond[N], replacing [N] with the number for the interface.

The following is a sample channel bonding configuration file:

For example, if channel bonding two Ethernet interfaces, both eth0 and eth1 may look like the following example:

In this example, replace [N] with the numerical value for the interface.