I do not believe that sysadmins should use sudo for any administrative tasks. Be sure to use the - option to ensure that the complete root environment is enabled. Preparationįirst, open one terminal session and su to root. I will indicate which parts should be performed as root and which by a non-root, unprivileged user. Rpms should never be built by root, but only by non-privileged users. What we have is a source that is also the executable.įor the most part, this project should be performed as the non-root user student. So we have no source code in the sense that it is something that needs to be compiled into binary executables. I am a sysadmin, and we sysadmins have different needs because we don’t-or we shouldn’t-compile code to use for administrative tasks we should use shell scripts. In addition, every one of the documents I found assumes that the code needs to be compiled from sources as in a development environment. What other information there is tends to be brief and apparently assumes that you already have a good deal of knowledge about the process. The RPM website also has links to other websites that have a lot of documentation about rpm. The online version of Maximum RPM is available at no charge and is kept up to date.

It is also out of print, and used copies go for hundreds of dollars.

That book is now somewhat out of date, as is the vast majority of information I have found. When I started this project, I found very little information about creating rpm packages, but I managed to find a book, Maximum RPM, that helped me figure it out. Although the rpm tool was formerly used to build rpm packages, that function was removed and a new tool, rpmbuild, was created to build new rpms. It reached the point that it took a great deal of time to install all of these packages, so I decided to automate that process by creating an rpm package that I could copy to the target hosts and install all of these files in their proper locations. Over the years I have created a number of Bash scripts, some of which have separate configuration files, that I like to install on most of my new computers and virtual machines. Free online course: RHEL Technical Overview.

Rhel rpm