gitea-pages/admin-guide/software.md

Software and Licenses

Licenses

Our Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions are provided by ETHZ, other licenses are usually managed by Roland Blättler.

The RHEL repositories can be accessed on the ETHZ Satellite server. It is only accessible from within PSI and a special account is needed, which can be requested at https://cd-portal.sp.ethz.ch/_layouts/15/start.aspx#/SitePages/Home.aspx.

One thing to keep in mind is that several groups at PSI use the Satellite server directly, so not all PSI hosts known to the Satellite belong to the central Linux environment. In particular the network team has a number of systems there.

Normally only certain infrastructure systems are registered with the Satellite.

About once a year we report the total number of systems to ETHZ, so they can track subscription usage. When we started using the ETHZ subscriptions in 2016 we provided an estimate of 2000 systems max.

Distribution and deployment

All software is distributed as RPMs with the following exceptions:

• some software is provided via AFS/NFS instead
• configuration files and scripts that can be considered configuration, e.g. the files in /etc/cron.daily
• server applications can be deployed by cloning a Git repository (e.g. sysdb)

There are a number of advantages to deploying software as RPM:

• automatic installation/protection of dependencies
• inventory of installed software (rpm -qa etc) including version information
• integrity checking (rpm -q --verify)
• ownership tracking (rpm -qf, yum provides)
• no network dependency, which is useful for laptops and increases reliability on other systems

Repositories

We maintain an internal mirror for every repository that we use, or at least a local repository containing the specific packages. We never point yum.conf (or any other package manager) to an external repository directly.

The repository server is repos.psi.ch.

Currently we maintain the following repositories:

1. RHEL 7 (almost all channels)
2. EPEL for RHEL 7
3. Puppetlabs PC1
4. Google Chrome
5. OpenAFS (PSI)
6. GPFS (PSI)
7. OpenHPC

The mirroring is done using :manpage:reposync(1) with custom :manpage:yum.conf files.

The script to run a sync of all the repositories is /opt/pli/sbin/psi-mirror-yum but is currently not executed automatically.

To add a new repository to the list the files /opt/pli/etc/mirror/yum.conf and /opt/pli/etc/mirror/repolist should be edited. The first file contains the repositories definitions, the second one the list of repositories to mirror.

Packaging

All packaging information for in-house packages must be tracked in Git. The repositories containing packaging information should be in the linux-packages group on the Gitlab server.