Chris's Linux and RPM geegaws

When CQUEST moved from X terminals to Linux workstations running RedHat Linux 5.1, I started accumulating small useful programs to do various things. This is a temporary place to stash them (the permanent place is currently experiencing disk problems). And by now this has become the permanent place for them, at least as permanent as anything on the world wide web ever is.

These are tools for system administrators, not necessarily end users. Read the documentation carefully or grues will eat you in the dark. Feedback (especially error reports or improvements) can be directed to me at any of my addresses; one is available at my home page here.

You may also be interested in my non Linux specific programs.

RPMs and RPM tools

RPM is the RedHat Linux package manager, and it's a relatively easy to use one at that, which may explain why we wound up building so many RPMs to do things.

rpmtools (version 0.10: generic binary, source) (version 0.9.4, for RH 7.3 and below: generic binary, source)

rpmtools is a set of programs that are useful for poking at rpms. The most useful of them is rpmcheckupg, which will report on which of the RPM files you give it as arguments appear to be installable on your system as upgrades, among other things. There is also rpmdelta which reports on differences between RPM files and the installed versions of those RPMs, and rpmchecks which does some basic checks of RPM files to see what interesting and possibly disturbing things installing them will do to your systems.
All of these tools are written in Python, using Red Hat's RPM Python bindings; they are thus architecture independant (in theory; let me know if this doesn't work in practice). Version 0.10 will hopefully work on Fedora Core 1, but this is untested.

The 0.9.4 generic binary RPM was built for Red Hat 7.x, and will install manpages and documentation files in the wrong locations on Red Hat 6.x systems. The 0.9.1 version is still available as generic binary, or source. Alternately people on Red Hat 6.x can use rpm --rebuild with the source RPM to produce a localized binary RPM.
(Last updated March 23rd, 2004)

Now-obsolete RPMs

These RPMs are obsolete, but are preserved for reasons of semi lazyness.

rpmtools (i386 binary, source)

rpmtools is a set of programs that are useful for poking at rpms. Rpmcheckupg will report on which rpms out of its arguments are likely installable as upgrades on the current machine. Checkrpms reports various potential problems or things to watch for in rpms you are considering installing.
This version is specifically for RedHat 6.2.

OpenSSL (i386 binary, i386 devel binary, source)

This is a locally created packaging of OpenSSL, which is required for OpenSSH. At the time it was created, there was no OpenSSL RPM package that we liked, so we built our own.
Compiled on RedHat 6.1, works on RedHat 6.1 and 6.2.

OpenSSH (i386 base, i386 server, i386 clients, i386 askpass, i386 GNOME askpass)

This is a locally created straight rebuild of the OpenSSH RPM from the OpenSSH site, built against our local OpenSSL libraries (see above). The OpenSSH configuration files and machine keys are located in /etc/ssh.
It was compiled on a RedHat 6.2 machine and is known to work on RedHat 6.1 as well.

Old RedHat 5.x RPMs

RPMs here are built for RedHat 5.1, with any additional restrictions noted.

rpmtools (i386 binary, source)

rpmtools is a set of programs (two so far, rpmcheckupg and checkrpms) that are useful for poking at rpms. Rpmcheckupg will report on which rpms out of its arguments are likely installable as upgrades on the current machine. Checkrpms reports various potential problems or things to watch for in rpms you are considering installing.
Note that you must have rpm-2.5.3 or later installed on your machine to have these work. They will produce warnings under rpm-2.92 or later, but probably still work.

ruptime (i386 binary, source rpm, source tarfile)

For some unfathonable reason, RedHat 5.x doesn't come with a ruptime command; apparently it's not part of the netkit, although they do provide rusers, rup, rwho, and the rwho daemon (ie, just about everything else). I got tired of that and fixed it, using code taken from the net and hacked around a bit. In the process I fixed its disbelief that machines would never be up for large amounts of time (we have machines that have been up that long).

ltrace (i386 binary, source rpm)

ltrace is a dynamic library call tracer; that is, it's like strace except it traces calls to dynamic libraries, instead of to the kernel (it can trace kernel calls too, but strace is better for that). This is a RPM packaging of the original Debian source code.