As a Linux Engineer, every now and again I stumble upon a nugget of glory when looking through the BASH history on one of the machines in the datacentre. Today was one such day. Two of the “Linux Developers” (and I use the term quite loosely) came into the lab and wondered over to my desk. I knew that they were there to ask me about installing packages from the RHEL 6.2 DVD after the initial installation, as I had an open ticket regarding the matter. After explaining to them the myriad differences between installing using rpm and installing via YUM, they were still having a bit of trouble getting some packages to install correctly. I hopped on one of the machines on which they were working, and found the following four entries in the history:
# yum install libc
# yum install libstdc
# yum install unix
# yum install internet
The first entry, I can understand. If one isn’t really familiar with a dependency list, seeing libc.so.6 or something similar may lead to trying to install libc instead of the appropriate package of glibc. The second entry I can also somewhat understand, but searching would have yielded the correct package name. The third entry is pretty awesome; installing an entire commercial Unix environment from within RHEL would be an impressive feat. 😉 The fourth entry is pure gold though. Syntactically, would that be a request to install networking functionality? Networking tools? The entire world wide web? Who knows, really.
I finally realised why the last command was entered. Apparently, none of the other commands worked and the developer noticed that the repository was not available. The reason that the repo was not available had nothing to do network error, but rather, that there were no repositories specified in /etc/yum.repos.d/.
I just thought that I would share some of the humour from a typical day’s work. 🙂
Cheers,
Zach
