Hi,

Yes, in a case such as yours the main xymon server RPM is going to pull in a few things that you don't need. Primarily, it's httpd (and whatever httpd pulls in, such as apr and whatnot) and rrdtool (and cairo, some display libs).

The reason httpd is a hard dependency is that some things are configured to be owned by the apache user, and the xymon.conf apache snippet is dropped in the directory.

It should be safe to install xymon with --nodeps to bypass those two packages, although you'll get some complaints as it installs. Assuming you're running ping checks, you'll want to manually pull in 'fping'. You can ignore net-snmp-libs if you're not going to be using xymon-snmpcollect.

The semanage stuff from policycoreutils-python is SELinux. Aside from the error output, it should be safe to ignore that as well.

Alas, you're correct in that yum will attempt to continue to pull in dependencies when they're available, so you'll continue to get these warnings.

I'd given consideration to splitting things out into xymon-xymonnet, xymon-proxy, xymon-server, xymon-xymongen and the like (in fact, a really, really old version of the RPM did just that), but it really felt like more complexity (and effort) than it was worth, especially since the upstream had had unified things together.

If there's enough demand, I'm open to creating sub-packages for it. But it does rather significantly increase complexity for people doing installs since they have to think of the different components coming in. The flip side is that for cases such as yours, or in micro-sized cloud/container environments, you can install the base RPM and avoid bringing in other dependencies.

One thing I can fix right away, though is wrapping the errors out of the semanage calls. Although the RPM is built with SELinux in mind, if the toolset isn't present there's no reason to annoy the user with the messages. I'll put that in the next update for sure.

Regards,

-jc

On Thu, March 12, 2015 11:28 am, SebA wrote:

Hi JC,

This may be off-topic for everyone else as I'm talking about an unofficial RPM (I know), but just to get this into the mailing list archive...

I want to install xymon server on a system, but it will be forwarding its results to another xymon server and therefore I have no need for web pages, RRD files, etc. In fact, I think I only need xymond, xymonnet and an add-on monitor. (Plus xymon-client.) When I try and install your RPM, it wants to install all sorts of things I don't want like apache and libX11 (see below).

Installing: xymon Installing for dependencies: apr apr-util apr-util-ldap audit-libs-python cairo dejavu-fonts-common dejavu-lgc-sans-mono-fonts dejavu-sans-mono-fonts fontconfig fontpackages-filesystem fping freetype httpd httpd-tools libX11 libX11-common libXau libXft libXrender libcgroup libselinux-python libsemanage-python libthai libxcb mailcap net-snmp-libs pango pixman policycoreutils-python rrdtool setools-libs setools-libs-python

Transaction Summary

Install 33 Package(s)

How should I do a minimal install? (I have your repo mirrored, but you can't exclude dependencies with yum AFAIK.) I just did a:

sudo rpm -i fping-3.10-2.el6.x86_64.rpm

<no errors>

sudo rpm -i --nodeps xymon-4.3.18-1.el6.x86_64.rpm

<output below> warning: user apache does not exist - using root warning: group apache does not exist - using root warning: user apache does not exist - using root warning: group apache does not exist - using root /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.5gv8Df: line 30: /usr/sbin/semanage: No such file or directory /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.5gv8Df: line 31: /usr/sbin/semanage: No such file or directory /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.5gv8Df: line 32: /usr/sbin/semanage: No such file or directory /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.5gv8Df: line 33: /usr/sbin/semanage: No such file or directory /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.5gv8Df: line 34: /usr/sbin/semanage: No such file or directory /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.5gv8Df: line 35: /usr/sbin/semanage: No such file or directory /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.5gv8Df: line 36: /usr/sbin/semanage: No such file or directory

Realizing that I probably needed /usr/sbin/semanage at least, I did:

sudo rpm -e xymon

warning: /etc/xymon/hosts.cfg saved as /etc/xymon/hosts.cfg.rpmsave

sudo rm -fR /etc/xymon

sudo yum install setools-libs-python

sudo yum install policycoreutils-python

And what the heck, it's just one package that I may use and xymon wants it directly, rather than a dependency of a dependency, so:

sudo yum install net-snmp-libs

sudo rpm -i --nodeps xymon-4.3.18-1.el6.x86_64.rpm

warning: user apache does not exist - using root warning: group apache does not exist - using root warning: user apache does not exist - using root warning: group apache does not exist - using root

Should I have any problems that you foresee?

Thanks and kind regards,

SebA