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Video Tutorial: Rob McNelly on Installing YUM on AIX

In the first TechChannel video tutorial of the year, learn how to install YUM on AIX from IBM Champion Rob McNelly:

Transcript:

On this test logical partition, I checked to see if YUM was installed by running the YUM command. It was not installed. I wrote an article about YUM in 2017 on the AIX change blog. You can find the blog archives on my website at robmcnelly.com. The YUM article has a link to a user group meeting where you can get more information about why you want to install YUM on your logical partition.

When you install an RPM package, you may find that there are other dependencies that also need to be installed. It can be tedious to manually sort out these dependencies. YUM solves this problem by automatically installing any needed dependencies when you install the packages that you want. You could also use YUM to make sure your packages are up to date. I followed the instructions in the article. On this logical partition, RPM was already installed so I just copied the YUM bundle version 6.0.

I omitted the section in this video where I downloaded and copied the file. I’m assuming you’ll be able to do that without any problems.

I copied the file to /home/guest and then I untared the file. I would recommend practicing the installation on test logical partition and I would encourage you to follow the change management policies that apply in your environment.

I’m letting the video run in real time so you can get a feel for how fast the process is. In this case after I CD into the directory and run the LS command, then I untar the file and I run RPM -I-V-H *RPM in order to install the package that YUM needs. Some typical packages that I see people installing on AIX regularly include bash, bzip, expect, gcc, hyper, Python, arsenic, screen, TightVNC, etc. You can go to the IBM toolbox for Linux applications and find packages that might interest you. Once RPM completed installation, I ran the RPM -Q in order to see all the RPM packages that were installed on my system.

The next thing I did is run YUM repo list and I found that I couldn’t resolve a hostname because DNS was not set up on the machine. I added Google’s DNS server and I pretended it was 1990 by pinging Yahoo. After I can resolve the hostname, I am able to run YUM repo list and in order to test that everything is working, I run YUM install Wget again in order to allow YUM to determine which dependencies I need and install them automatically.

Again, I am letting this download and install packages in real time so that you can a feel for how long it takes. As you can see, it is not long at all. Obviously you will need to make changes to your repository if you are unable to reach the internet directly. I would expect that with the sensitive information most of our production machines are processing, being able to directly connect AIX logical partitions to the internet will be rare so downloading the packages and saving them on a local machine may be the only way you’ll be able to get this process to work.

Now that WGet has finished installing, I’m going to go ahead and let YUM check to see if my RPM packages are all up to date. There are some packages that need to be updated on my system so I will go ahead and let it do that. As I have stated numerous times, I’m allowing this process to run in real time so you can see that it does not take long to run depending on your connection to your repository.

By using this process, installing additional RPM packages is a breeze. You no longer have to manually intervene. Some of you may say that you are already using this tool but you would be surprised how many people still do not realize that they are able to use YUM with AIX. Some of the things that we take for granted are still not widely known which is why I wanted to bring attention to the topic today.

I want to thank you for your time and if you had additional topics you’d like to see me cover, feel free to send me an email.