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

[Kuba Ober]

>     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?

I use yum, so personally I don't care much: I'd use yum even if I had used 
RHEL instead of CentOS.

It'd be nice to have an .rpm that, besides putting the repo file 
in /etc/yum.repos.d, modifies /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources as part of its 
postinstall script. That way both RHN and yum systems would be covered, and 
since for CentOS one uses same dell packages as for respective RHEL, there 
should be no other problems methinks.

The rpm in question is probably firmware-addon-dell, just as you said :)

Cheers, Kuba