Linux Hosts with mixed repositories

system · October 30, 2013, 3:47am

I have been asked to look into BigFix and its potential impact on my group’s (NIH/NIAID Rocky Mountain Lab High Performance Group) Linux hosts. I have spent a day looking into BigFix, searching the Forums, and listing questions that I am not seeing ready answers for. My first question has to deal with what I would call Linux hosts with mixed repositories.

In the supported OSes list, I see various Linux distros: RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu, etc. The usual suspects. I also know from our experience, that no single host of any distro-flavor that we have deployed, is maintained by only the vendor’s repositories. For instance, out CentOS hosts nearly all have epel.repo in the /etc/yum/yum.repos.d directories in addition to the CentOS*.repo. Likewise, our SuSE hosts, also pull in software from dag.

Because we have mixed repositories we have priorities set on repository configurations in the .repo files.

My question is how does BigFix handle these situations?

Thanks!

Rohn

greenb · November 22, 2013, 11:11am

(imported comment written by BrianPGreen)

Hmm, I’m not very familiar with linux patching or software distribution. I think we might download the packages directly from redhat or the linux’s vendors website instead of using the repos on the machine. I’ll try to look this up tomorrow. (Sorry for the super late response).