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.

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.

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