Ice Repository for RHEL4

[kvogel]

I'm glad there now is a yum-style repository available for RHEL4/CentOS4. However the packages could use some improvements.

* ice package

The icegridnode / icegridregistry startup scripts try to run the service as user iceuser, however the RPM doesnt create these accounts. It would be nice if there was a preinstall script doing:

/usr/sbin/groupadd iceuser >/dev/null 2>&1 || :;
/usr/sbin/useradd -c "IceGrid" -g iceuser -s /sbin/nologin -r -d /var/lib/icegrid iceuser >/dev/null 2>&1 || :;

(I left out the part specifying a GID, so the next available GID will be chosen)

* ice-python

Just installing this RPM doesnt create a workable ice python setup. You still need to set the PYTHONPATH to the directory. Probably would be better if the RPM would use the python site-packages directory as install destination.


* install instructions

The download page has a description for RHEL4 to put the repos file in the yum directory. However, yum isn't part of RHEL4, it's only present on CentOS4.. up2date (the official update tool from the Redhat Network) can use yum repos though, by adding the following line to the file /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources:

yum IceRepo http://www.zeroc.com/download/Ice/3.2/rhel4/$ARCH/

An update of the download page might be nice.

[beagles]

Thanks for the feedback! We'll add these items to our TODO for the next release.

Cheers,
Brent

[bernard]

Hi Karl,

I updated the download page with the up2date instructions -- thanks for pointing out this feature of up2date.

Regarding 'iceuser', I am not sure the RPM installation should create it.

For one, these /etc/init.d scripts and config files are just samples: you should really review and change them, not start blindly the various daemons.

Then, for icegridnode, the user in question will be running your servers: you may want a user with its own home directory, and who can access various resources.

You may also use Ice without any of these daemons; IMO creating a new user/group is a bigger deal than installing a few extra files. As a result, if we want to create this user automatically, we'd probably also want to package these initd scripts in a separate RPM.

Cheers,
Bernard