Package choices in the TRIUMF kickstart

The TRIUMF kickstart in an almost everything installation of Scientific Linux.  Packages that are omitted are mostly server-related packages or packages specifically for laptops (e.g. power-managment, wireless networking, bluetooth, ...). The complete list of packages is in the kickstart configuration-file. Below are some notes on choices made in the TRIUMF kickstart.

Java

ScientificLinux includes packages for java; jdk and java-1.6.0.-sun-compat.  The jdk rpm is the original from SUN and is not signed.  The TRIUMF kickstart enables signature checking, so an update to an unsigned package causes all updates to fail.  In addition, the SUN rpm does not correctly configure the web-browser plugin on 64-bit systems.  Thus the TRIUMF kickstart uses a custom confiuration for the package repository that excludes jdk and java-1.6.0-sun-compat.  TRIUMF builds and signs java rpms that resolve these problems.  They are included in the TRIUMF package repository and installed by the TRIUMF kickstart.

Mail-transport agent

The traditional MTA for UNIX type systems is sendmail. However, this has a number of security concerns and is very hard to configure.  ScientificLinux offers an alternative MTA, postfix, which is designed to be a drop in replacement for sendmail.  The TRIUMF kickstart installs postfix as the default MTA.

Yum configuration

Yum is the package manager for ScientificLinux.   The standard yum configuration package for Scientific Linux is yum-conf, however the TRIUMF kickstart installs a site-specific version called triumf-sl-yumconf which:

• Uses the TRIUMF mirror for updates
• Excludes the default Java packages (see above)
• Points to the TRIUMF mirror of other 3rd-party repositories; EPEL, Adobe, ELREPO
  

Automatic security-updates

yum-updatesd

Installs a background task that checks for available updates and notifies via desktop pop-ups. It can also be configured to notify via e-mail. Security updates must then be initiated manually.

yum-autoupdate

Installs a task that is run daily to automatically apply security updates and send an e-mail to root.  Excluding some packages from automatic updates, is done through a configuration file but other customisations are done by changing the cron script.

yum-cron

Similar to yum-autoupdate in that security updates occur daily.  However, by default, it only sends e-mail to root when an update generates output; usually indicating a problem.  In addition, it uses a yum-shell script to run updates as a transaction and can be easily customised without modifiy the cron script.  You can, for example, configure it to send e-mail when an update to some package is available, but not automatically update that package.

The TRIUMF kickstart installs yum-cron and enables it.

For SL-5 only, there is a TRIUMF rpm that provides a modified version of yum-autoupdate.  The modifications only affect the subject-line of the e-mail.   if you want an e-mail to be sent to root whenever any package is updated, and you don't need the additional flexibility of yum-cron, then you can replace it with yum-autoupdate via:

yum install triumf-yum-autoupdate
yum remove yum-cron

Packages from other reposistories

 The TRIUMF kickstart enables several 3rd-party repositories of packages which are compatible with ScientificLinux. Below is a list of these repositories and packages installed from them.

EPEL

alpine, cernlib, dcap, dia, lyx, maxima, octave, patchy,
paw, plplot, scribus, TeXmacs, xemacs, tetx-IEEEtran

 Adobe

AdobeReader, flash-plugin

ELRepo

No packages are installed from this repository by default, but it can be used to install proprietry Nvidia drivers.