Chapter 11. Techniques for system administrators
The following are introduction to additional topics for advanced users rather than the material that has been presented so far in this manual and may be useful in more complex software management environments, in particular, Fedora desktops or servers network, computer centers, etc.
11.1. Remote configuration
It is possible to centralize all yum configuration on one external server and make yum obtain those settings at runtime. Later, the administrator can even have multiple settings for the same server and given the specific circumstances, use one or another setting at will.
The first useful option in this direction is the execution of yum --config (-c) command, wich lets you specify the configuration file to use, that in Fedora defaults to /etc/yum.conf, however, you can use HTTP and FTP URLs as the remote location for the configuration file.
# yum --config=http://central.repo.conf/yum.conf
If it is combined with a bash alias, results in a clean solution for the local user.
$ alias yum='yum --config=http://central.repo.conf/yum.conf '
$ alias
alias l.='ls -d .* --color=auto'
alias ll='ls -l --color=auto'
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias vi='vim'
alias which='alias | /usr/bin/which --tty-only --read-alias --show-dot --show-tilde'
alias yum='yum --config=http://central.repo.conf/yum.conf '
The syntax include for inclusion in /etc/yum.conf and .repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d/ allows the addition of additional remote settings via an URL, and this is the second way to load remote configuration. Use the format:
include=url://path/to/the/configuration/file
The configuration file will be inserted in the position of include. The file inclusion can be nested with new include. yum will abort when an infinite loop error is detected.
