The Red Hat Enterprise Linux group provides a mirror of the RPM repositories maintained by Dag Wieers as part of the RPMforge project. The RPMforge collaboration repackages many RPMs that are not included as part of the stock Linux distributions, including versions of many packages still in testing.

These packages are available directly from Dag's site. We provide a complete local mirror of Dag's site for our user's benefit. The mirror is updated nightly after 18:00 CST/CDT.

You can view listings and descriptions of the packages provided at Dag's site.

The collections in Dag's repositories are all RPMs that have been organized in a two ways for use by multiple retrieval and installation methods. These include the apt repository system that is accessible using apt-rpm, and the yum repository system accessible using the yum tools. Red Hat's up2date, tool can be configured to use either type of repository. Configuration file settings for all three methods are described below. The packages for all distributions have also been collected together in one packages area. The repositories are a subset of this collection. There are versions of the packages, such as test versions, that are present in the packages collection that are not included in the repositories.

It is assumed that you have experience with yum, up2date and/or apt. If not, the links in the above paragraphs are good places to start. Here we provide you with the information on what you need to include in your configuration files to use this mirror server.

For most package installations, you will need to import Dag's public GPG key into the key ring on your system. You can either get the key from his site or from our local site.

Once you have downloaded the key, import it into your keyring with the command

yum retrieves all of the information it needs to install an RPM from the RPM headers themselves. Configuring yum to find an RPM repository is a simple matter of informing yum of the location of a server that has a copy of the RPM (and its dependencies) and which protocol to use to download the packages. Beginning with version 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) uses yum as its package manager. On RHEL 5, $releasever is replaced by el5Server or el5Client. Dag did not follow this convention. In order to add this repository to your yum configuration for any version of RHEL, create the file /etc/yum.repos.d/dag.repo containing Fedora and Fedora Core also use yum for package management. For these distributions, create the same file with the following contents: using the appropriate release version for your system.

Consult the yum.conf man page if you wish to delve deeper into the details of these settings.

Iowa State users who participate in our Red Hat Network subscription and are running RHEL version 4 or older should use up2date to download and maintain packages from this mirror. up2date is used by the Red Hat Network to maintain your systems and hence use of up2date for these repositories maintains consistency. To use up2date to access these repositories, modify /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources to include something similar to

apt gets its information as to the location of software repositories from its sources file. On your system you should modify the file /etc/apt/sources.list to include something similar to the following for Red Hat Enterprise Linux: For Fedora Core, modify /etc/apt/sources.list to include a line similar to using the appropriate release version and base architecture for your system.

You may also simply download the RPMs via http or ftp. and install them yourself using rpm. If any of this confuses you or you are receiving error messages, there are several avenues available for resolving your problems. Just go to the Getting Help link on the Iowa State Red Hat Enterprise Linux web site.

It also never hurts to consult the extensive amount of information available at the source - Dag Wieers' web site.

You may also contact the people who maintain this mirror.