Jan 2017


Today I started to use some brand new G7 MFEL Servers, that have CentOS 7.2 preinstalled. The preinstalled CentOS is a 'minimal' install. And while it contains everything you need to run the MFEL, it has some files missing that we have been using on MFEL G6s that were setup long before we got them.

A Repository has a few meanings, but in the sense I am referring to, a repository is a location maintained by the Linux distribution provider, that contains the latest versions of all of the components required for that Linux distribution, be it essential components for the OS to run, or addons that might be required later (htop for example).

It seems by default the MFEL has a reference to a repository that is located on its own internal drive, this contains nothing, so we need to update this first.

The repository refers to Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL). So we are installing the epel repositories, they may be others, but I am not looking at alternatives at this poin.t

To update the repositories, you have to download the latest version and install it. Most instrucitons on the internet will tell you to use wget, however I have found two issues:

wget is not installed, and to install it you would need to update the repositories (chicken and egg) wget does not seem to be listed as a repository item, so is not available via the repository I am installing (epel)

curl is installed, and so we can use Curl as a drop in replacement for wget.

Before downloading anything, you need to know your Linux version (just 5,6,7 etc) for this you can use:

  rpm --query centos-release
  
  centos-release-7-2.1511.el7.centos.2.10.x86_64

Now you can install the correct epel version

Instead of using     wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

     You can use     curl -O https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
     
     
     curl -O https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
   
     % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                    Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left   Speed
   100 14704  100 14704    0     0  15144      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 15143

Remember to use the correct version ../pub/epel/epel-release-latest- 7 .noarch.rpm)

sudo rpm -ivh epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
sudo yum clean all
sudo rpmdb -v --rebuilddb
sudo yum -y install libselinux-python

That's it, epel repository is now installed. You can check from the website what is available. So for instance, from a web browser navigate to:

  https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel

Here you will see a list like:



Navigate to

  7Server/x86_64/h

And scroll down until you see htop



So we can see that htop is part of the epel repository and can be installed.