[RFC] RHEL3/4 - automatic setup for Dell system-specific repo

[Michael E Brown]

All,
    Would like feedback on the following proposal for how to better
support RHEL3 and RHEL4 in the Dell system-specific repo announced
yesterday.

    Right now, for yum-based systems (eg. RHEL5), I have a yum-plugin in
firmware-addon-dell which will automatically set yum variables so that
yum can automatically find and use the correct system-specific repo.
Right now, there is no RHEL5 content in the repo, but I expect that to
change in the next few weeks.

    RHEL 3/4 systems do not use yum by default, though, so this presents
a problem. The second part of the problem is that up2date does not have
a plugin mechanism that I can use to set the variables like I do with
yum.

    I just posted a message to the linux-poweredge mailing list
detailing how RHEL3/4 users can now manually configure their systems to
use this repository. What is lacking is an easy method to automatically
set up this repository.

    Proposal: Have a script that calls libsmbios to get the system ID,
and then updates the /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources file manually. This
script would be called upon setup of the repo to drop in the correct
system repo. Additionally, we could then have a boot script that checks
and updates this line at boot time for those cases where users swap hard
drives between machines.

    I intend to write this script and add it to firmware-addon-dell.
Does anybody have any feedback for this?
--
Michael