rpm2html/rpmfind FAQ

Rpmfind crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.

Check that an HTTP_PROXY or http_proxy environment variable is set. It has been found taht sometimes the libWWW crashes during transfers if this environment variable is set, unset it, relaunch rpmfind and edit the ~/.rpmfind to set-up the httpProxy and ftpProxy variables instead. This bug will be fixed in the next version.

How can I tune rpmfind to avoid getting package from distribution XXX ? How can I force packages to come from distribution YYY ?

Change your $HOME/.rpmfind to adjust the rating for the distribution. Put a -1 rating for distributions you don't want packages from. To express preference toward a given distribution give a good rating (e.g. 1000) to it.

Rpmfind tend to suggest me glibc binaries eve if I'm running a libc5 based system

Change your $HOME/.rpmfind in the section packages:

-------------- original --------------
;
; Packages rejection criteria
;
[packages]
no_upgrade=glibc
no_upgrade=glibc.so.*
no_upgrade=libc
no_upgrade=libc.so.*
no_depend=libc.so.3
--------------------------------------

To

--------------------------------------
;
; Packages rejection criteria
;
[packages]
no_upgrade=glibc
no_upgrade=glibc.so.*
no_upgrade=libc
no_upgrade=libc.so.*
no_depend=libc.so.3

no_upgrade=glibc.*
no_depend=glibc.*
no_depend=libc.so.6
--------------------------------------

Rpmfind/rpm2html fails to open the RPM database.

If you have upgraded to rpm-2.5.3, one simple way to avoid this problem is to execute the following command as root:

 cd /usr/lib ; ln -s rpm/rpmpopt . ; ln -s rpm/rpmrc . 

I'm getting "Increase MAX_MIRRORS=20" messages.

Update to the very latest version of rpmfind

I'm behind a firewall and rpmfind doesn't work.

Edit ~/.rpmfind and change the variables httpProxy and/or ftpProxy to give the URL of the proxy:

httpProxy=http://myhttpproxy:3128/

How to build a Web page that described the packages installed on a machine.

This is definitely possible, here is an example of a config file doing exactly that:

maint=Sysadmin
mail=root@host.domain
dir=/home/httpd/html/setup
url=/setup
tree=true

[localbase]
name=Current Setup
ftp=ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/redhat-5.0/i386/RedHat/RPMS
ftpsrc=ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/redhat-5.0/SRPMS
color=#ffffff

The point here is that [localbase] hard coded value force rpm2html to dump the RPM installed database instead of browsing a directory.

Note: I would recommend some care about exporting publicly the list of exported packages installed on a machine to the whole internet. While this feature is definitely useful as a system administration tool, this is a potential security hole and action should be taken to restrain accesses to the generated pages

.