Hi,

I've been setting up Linux servers (specifically RedHat) for our small company for a while now, and have been relatively content with default installs to get them up and running. But I have always really wanted to build very lean and efficient machines configured with the bare minimum that they need to fully provide a single service. But I have a problem...

I am in no way a Linux expert, and my problem is with dependencies. I have attempted to do a minimal install of of the OS, and then download and install something like Apache, but I hit a brick wall because of the applications dependencies. Even when I research the dependencies and then download and install *those* applications, they too have yet more dependencies.

I seem to be in a seemingly endless loop, which is requiring ridiculous amounts of time, and I really can't believe that this is the way it's meant to be done. I am pretty sure (hopefully) that this is just an incredibly "noob" thing that I am doing and that there is a much simpler way to ensure that all dependencies are satisfied.

Anyone care to enlighten me?

Donald

Are you installing an Old Red Hat distro, or RHEL? If it is the latter, you are probably trying to install a recent Apache package when all of your libraries are obsolete.

If this isn't the case, if you go to the http://rpm.pbone.net website and filter the search for your particular distro and version, it does a good job of listing the dependencies and which packages you need to install. It also provides links to download the dependencies.

I think you misunderstood what I meant.

I am not talking just about apache, but since you mentioned that I will stick with that example:

I do not have a problem installing Apache on RedHat, I can install it fine as long as I install the dependencies. My question is not in regards to any particular applications dependencies, but how to satisfy large dependency trees effectively when designing a new server setup.

There are a couple of things I would imagine would exist:

1. Some way to get a print out of a dependency tree
2. Some way to auto-install all dependencies in the tree

Imagine that I had carried out a minimal install with RHEL4, then using that as a gold standard I created a master image of that setup and copied it to five separate machines. Now I want do go ahead and setup a different service on each of the five machines:

1. openLDAP
2. Apache
3. MySQL
4. Bind
5. Sendmail

Now, obviously with each of those services comes a considerable amount of dependencies. Those dependencies also have dependencies who have dependencies who have dependencies... and so on.

How am I supposed to efficiently ensure that all the dependencies are satisfied without literally determining the dependencies of each service? Then determining the dependencies of the dependencies... and so on, until I know what exactly I need to install. Then work my way back up the dependency tree and install everything.

It seems like an needlessly long and tedious task to do it this way and I really believe there must be a simpler way of going about it.

Sorry to rant on so long, but it's really the only way I can demonstrate what I am doing.

P.S. I am not using RPM's, I am compiling from source.