The fight to find rpms for old Red Hat Linux servers

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on February 2nd 2016 - Listed in Linux

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Wow - I need to add a RHEL4 server into the new Icinga 2 monitoring. It's not the oldest installation I've seen so far (a couple of years ago I added a FreeBSD 5.x and a Red Hat 7 into the monitoring...) but with older and EOL distros it's always a fight to find the necessary software.

I simply wanted to install the nagios-plugins package, which I was luckily able to find on rpmfind.net. However:

rpm -i --test nagios-plugins-1.4.16-1.el4.rf.i386.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
        fping is needed by nagios-plugins-1.4.16-1.el4.rf.i386
        perl(Net::SNMP) is needed by nagios-plugins-1.4.16-1.el4.rf.i386

And now the quest began. fping itself was pretty easy:

rpm -ivh fping-3.10-1.el4.rf.i386.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:fping                  ########################################### [100%]

But perl-Net-Snmp asked for other dependencies which were hard to find:

rpm -i --test perl-Net-SNMP-5.2.0-1.2.el4.rf.noarch.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
        perl(Crypt::DES) is needed by perl-Net-SNMP-5.2.0-1.2.el4.rf.noarch
        perl(Digest::HMAC) is needed by perl-Net-SNMP-5.2.0-1.2.el4.rf.noarch
        perl(Digest::SHA1) is needed by perl-Net-SNMP-5.2.0-1.2.el4.rf.noarch
        perl(Socket6) >= 0.19 is needed by perl-Net-SNMP-5.2.0-1.2.el4.rf.noarch

Especially perl-digest-hmac and perl-digest-sha1 was difficult to find, but eventually I came across a private mirror for EL4.

So at the end the following rpm's were downloaded and installed:

rpm -ivh fping-3.10-1.el4.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh perl-Digest-SHA-5.71-1.el4.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh perl-Crypt-DES-2.05-3.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh perl-Digest-SHA1-2.13-1.el4.rfx.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh perl-Digest-HMAC-1.03-1.el4.pp.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh perl-Socket6-0.23-1.el4.pp.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh perl-Net-SNMP-5.2.0-1.2.el4.rf.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh nagios-plugins-1.4.16-1.el4.rf.i386.rpm

Oh how much I love well configured software dependency resolver like zypper or apt (or even yum), if a working repo was available...

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