Maintain groups of machines with "Yum"

Shout outs to "madadmin"

Yum is an automatic updater and package management tool for rpm based systems. Yum automatically computes dependencies and figures out what steps need to occur in order to install packages. Yum can not only be used to keep packages already installed on your system updated, but can also be used to install packages directly.

Configuring Yum

1. Edit "/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo" and replace the "baseurl" with the address of the repository closest to you (baseurl=ftp://fedora.bu.edu/fedora/core/$releasever/$basearch/os/).
2. Edit "/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo" and replace the "baseurl" with the address of the repository closest to you (baseurl=ftp://fedora.bu.edu/fedora/core/$releasever/$basearch/os/).
3. Edit "/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources" the mirror site you have chosen . yum fedora-core-3 ftp://fedora.bu.edu/fedora/core/3/i386/os
   yum updates-released-fc3 ftp://fedora.bu.edu/fedora/core/updates/3/i386

Using Yum

#yum check-update
Yum will download the complete set of current headers from the repository server you specified in your yum.conf file.

#yum update
Check the packages currently installed on your system are up to date with the latest version.

#yum update
Yum will proceed to compare all packages currently installed on your system with those currently available on the repository server, once complete, it will present you with an information screen listing details of what it intends to do and ask you for confirmation.

#yum update nmap
To update a specific package.

#yum install xchat
To install a package you don't have currently.

#yum search nmap gui
You have nmap installed already, and you'd like a gui interface to it, but you have no idea what the package might be called.

#yum provides libc6.1-1.so.2
Need a certain library which is not a standalone package.

#yum remove nmap
To remove a package.

#yum clean all
Deletes any old cached packages from your system as well as removing any old rpm headers that are no longer needed.

#yum info xchat
Just info no installation.