AIX RPM Dependency Hell
Anyone that’s ever worked in a mixed OS environment has surely encountered a time when they’ve needed to install rpm’s on AIX. Whether is was to get the latest GNU version of utilities for more flexible scripting, to support 3rd party monitoring tools, or because you’re developers were too lazy to properly compile installp bundles, we’ve almost all been there. It does, however, seem as if IBM added the rpm support and then has been on vacation ever since. The single most annoying limitation is the lack of dependency resolution. RPM “a” requires rpm’s “a-l” and each of those rpm’s require others, and it goes on and on and on. A simple port of YUM would be stupendous, but alas, we are left without. One man, Michael Perzl, of “http://www.perzl.org/” has graciously supported maintaining various rpm’s compiled for AIX and has even taken some great strides to setting up an infrastructure to support rpm dependency trees for AIX. Michael has setup the rpm distribution and has programmatically generated some dependency lists for those rpm’s. The last remaining step of the rpm dependency hell resolution is to have dependency lists for all rpm’s in the tree sorted and downloaded automatically. I think I’ve fixed the final piece with a script that recursively calls a function to build a list and download all unique rpm’s in the tree.. I’ve tested locally to much success, but as always, feel free to try it out and let me know if anything breaks. My tools are meant to be free, open, and a product of the larger Power community, so I’ve added this out to GitHub to make distribution easier.
Let me know if you have any questions or additions/corrections.
AIX RPM Dependency Script at GitHub
Scripts to the Rescue!
It’s been a while since I’ve added anything new to the site, but hopefully that will change soon. I’m no longer traveling every week and I’m back in a Production Shop so I should be able to generate some juicy content! While you all wait for that, I’m uploaded some scripts I’ve written for various things here and there to GitHub. Some are polished and have a good amount of logic….some are NOT! Feel free to peruse and hopefully they can be of use to someone out there.
https://github.com/jmsearcy/scripts/tree/master/AIX
I will eventually move these to a dedicated DDPWR GitHUb account, but they will be under my personal account for now. If you have any personal scripts you’re fond of, feel free to shoot them this way and I can add them to the collection (or add you to the repo on GitHub).
Enjoy!
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Calling all Power Fanatics…
The desire I have for this site is to provide a place for the Power systems community to contribute practical knowledge that could be useful to an admin beginning his first day of work, all the way up to the seasoned grey beard. I’ve often scavenged the web in the heat of an outage for an article to help with the current situation, only to find that there aren’t many sites that provide brief or concise information to help. Typically I end up having to read through a ton of information that’s just not useful before I get to the meat of the solution. All of that being said, if you feel you have information that the viewers of this site could find useful, please send your article to submissions@ddpwr.com. Please only submit original articles.
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