RHEL YUM (Yellow-dog Updater and Modifier) configuration using local DVD

Hello Guys,

I would like to share some simple steps to configure YUM (Yellow-dog Updater and Modifier) with local DVD in RHEL. In olden days I faced lot of challenges in installing packages in Linux due to dependencies. If you want to install one package it will fail and asking for another dependencies and if you install the dependency it will prompt for another one. End of the day we will end up in a soupJ.

I had many experience like this .and most of the time there is no YUM server available in customer places.

In Linux installing packages is a tedious process, sometimes its headache to install all the dependencies. So Red-hat comes with a solution to overcome this dependency problem in most situations, the solution for this is nothing but YUM implementation. This will resolve this dependency issue.

Here I am using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.3     

So let’s start!

• Mount the RHEL OS DVD. Mount the DVD into /cdrom directory.

•   Go to /etc/yum.repos.ddirectory there you can see a sample file “rhel-source.repo” file. This file is configuration file for YUM client.

• Copy the file to a different name, just for keeping a backup and the new file is used for configuration. Here I have given a name as “testserver.repo”. You can give any name it’s up to you

• .    Edit testserver.repo file to make the configuration. Here is the configuration that required to change for making the local DVD as YUM repository.

if you don't mentioned  file://cdrom/HighAvailability and /cdrom/LoadBalancer in YUM config file you cannot install the Cluster package and loadbalance package . so for making a DVD as repo you need have all 3 entries.

Let me explain what actually these four entries mean.

[test-source] ==>This informs what is the repository name.

Name ==> Its used to see the information about the repo.

baseurl ==> This is the server and path of the repo(here its a local repo so the base url is just a file:///

For example you are creating YUM client through FTP then base url should be like this

baseurl=ftp://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/pub/Server

gpgcheck ==> This is to check the authentication of the repository, which is disabled in this case.

Now we are done with the configuration to use local DVD as a YUM repository and configured the local YUM client!!..  In-order to use yum repository we have to clean the yum meta data, so before installing any package first time use yum clean all command as shown below.

1.    Now you can install any package without fearing of dependencies. Enjoy !!!

#yum install <package name>

Here I am trying with vftpd package.

         #yum install vsftpd

Share your feedback to improve my blogging. Thanks in advance J.