=head1 NAME

urpmihowto - urpmi Advanced How-To

=head1 Basic notions

=head2 Packages and media

The urpmi suite of tools has for main purpose to download and to install
RPM packages easily.

Software packages often depend on each other; urpmi is able to recognize
those dependencies, to download missing required packages as needed, and
to remove conflicting packages if it needs to.

urpmi gets the list of available RPMs, and the RPMs themselves, from a
B<media>. Roughly speaking, a media is described by a name and by a
location, specified by an URL. Currently supported media types are: local
drives, removable drives (such as CDs), ISO images, and networked media
via different protocols (http, ftp, ssh and rsync). NFS mounted
directories are treated like local drives.

=head2 Installing and updating RPMs

The tool used to install RPMs is urpmi.

=head2 Removing RPMs

The tool used to deinstall RPMs is urpme.

=head1 Media management

=head2 Adding media

=head2 Removing media

=head2 Inactive media

=head2 Creating your own media

gendistrib

public key

=head1 Searching for packages

=head2 urpmf

=head2 urpmq

=head1 urpmi-parallel

urpmi-parallel is an add-on to urpmi that is useful to install packages on
a network: it will run an urpmi command in parallel on a specified number
of hosts. In more detail, the machine you run the command on (the
"server") tests its result on each machine in the group in turn (the
"clients"), downloads all necessary packages for all machines in the
group, distributes the appropriate packages to each machine, then calls
urpmi on the machine to do the actual installation.

urpmi must be installed on all client machines, but it is not necessary to
have media defined on these.

To use it, follow those steps :

=over 4

=item *

make sure you can ssh from the server to each client machine as root (you
can use ssh-add on the server host to avoid entering your passphrase
and/or password many times).

=item *

install urpmi-parallel-ssh and/or urpmi-parallel-ka-run on the server
machine. The first plugin uses plain ssh to distribute commands to other
hosts, the second one uses ka-run, an efficient parallelization method on
top of any remote shell (rsh or ssh), adapted to clusters.

=item *

Edit /etc/urpmi/parallel.cfg to look something like this:

    mynetwork:ssh:host1:host2:host3

On this line, C<mynetwork> is the name of the alias you'll use to specify
the network to urpmi, C<ssh> is the install method (to use C<ka-run>, look
up the entry for /etc/urpmi/parallel.cfg in urpmi.files(5)), and hostN are
the hostnames of all clients on your network. You can put C<localhost> in
this list.

=item *

Run the urpmi command : for example, to install "package_name" :

    urpmi --parallel mynetwork package_name

=back

=head1 urpmi.recover

urpmi.recover is a tool to help management of RPM rollbacks. One rarely
used feature of RPM is that it can "repackage" the RPMs it deinstalls
(either because they are upgraded to a newer version, or because they are
plainly erased), and then reinstall the repackaged RPMs, thereby restoring
the system to a previous (hopefully more stable) state.

urpmi.recover has three main functions:

=over 4

=item define a checkpoint

C<urpmi.recover --checkpoint> is used to define a point in your system
that you consider stable, and to start storing info that will enable you
to rollback to this state (or to any later state).

=item list installations you've done

C<urpmi.recover --list date> is used to list chronologically all
installations and upgrades on your system up to the specified date. The
output format gives them grouped by installation transactions. (This
option has two variants, C<--list-all> and C<--list-safe>.) Here are some
examples :

List all installations made during the last day :

    urpmi.recover --list '1 day ago'

List all installations since 7th february 2006 :

    urpmi.recover --list 2006-02-07

List all installations since the checkpoint :

    urpmi.recover --list-safe

Lists all installations and upgrades known to the RPM database :

    urpmi.recover --list-all

=item perform rollbacks

C<urpmi.recover --rollback> is used to roll back installations and
upgrades to a previous point in the past (at most until your checkpoint.)
It has two variants :

To roll back until a specified date :

    urpmi.recover --rollback <date>

The date can be a duration (for example "2 hours ago") or a date given
in YYYY-MM-SS hh:mm format.

To roll back a specified number of transactions :

    urpmi.recover --rollback <number of transactions>

In both cases, be careful not to rollback beyond the checkpoint!

=back

Once you've defined a checkpoint, when you use urpmi, urpme or directly
rpm to install or remove packages, the older packages will be stored in
/var/spool/repackage. You thus must make sure you have enough space on
this partition to store all repackaged RPMs.

Technically, defining a checkpoint is equivalent to writing a file
/etc/rpm/macros.d/urpmi.recover.macros that overrides the rpm macros
used to set up the repackaging functionalities of rpm. You can change
C<%_repackage_dir> there if you want to, if you don't want to store
repackaged RPMs in /var/spool/repackage.

If you want to disable the repackaging functionality and clean up the
repackage spool, use C<urpmi.recover --disable>. Warning: rollbacks won't
be possible anymore.

=head1 Restricted urpmi

urpmi has a "restricted" counterpart: rurpmi. It is similar to urpmi, but
has a stripped-down set of features. It's intended to be used by users
without root privileges, but with sudo rights on it, preventing any abuse
of this tool to compromise the system.

Its syntax is similar to the one of urpmi, but it disallows installing
arbitrary RPMs: those are forcibly downloaded from a registered media.
A number of dangerous options, listed in the rurpmi(8) manpage, are also
forbidden.

=cut