Luc de Louw's Blog

I was criticizing that software in RHEL is too outdated for web servers quite soon after release, see my blog post http://blog.delouw.ch/2010/05/02/rhel6-as-a-web-server/. While this is true for a system fully supported by Red Hat, I learned an alternative from a comment on the post. This alternative is the so called IUS community repository.

About the IUS Community Project
The project was launched in September 2009. In spite of being a young project, it has a history. At Rackspace, a large hosting company which is operating thousands of production (web) servers, it was an internal project since 2006. They decided to build up a community around it, like Fedora is for RHEL, Quote: “IUS is The Fedora of Rackspace RPMS”

Support
Like for other community repositories out there, you cannot expect a “official” support neither from Red Hat nor from IUS or Rackspace. Of course there are the usual support sources for communities such as forums, IRC, bugtracker etc.

The difference to other repositories
While most community repositories such as EPEL, rpmforge etc. are focused on providing missing software, IUS focuses on providing upgrades for web server related software which is included in RHEL. This includes PHP, Python, MySQL and others.

Package conflicts with the stock distribution
One may think replace stock software with newer version is tricky and create conflicts. There is one way to find out: Lets give it a try…

The test
The server is a basic install of the yesterday released Centos 5.5. The following installation turns this machine in a lightweight LAMP server:

yum install httpd php-mysql php php-cli php-common php-pgsql php-dba php-pdo php-gd mysql-server perl-DBD-MySQL.

Now we have the situation like it exists in many companies: An outdated webserver. Now we want to upgrade PHP to 5.3.x. Lets see what happens.


[root@centos5 ~]# rpm -i http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/5/x86_64/ius-release-1-4.ius.el5.noarch.rpm
warning: /var/tmp/rpm-xfer.o6JH6k: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 9cd4953f
[root@centos5 ~]# rpm -i http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/5/x86_64/epel-release-1-1.ius.el5.noarch.rpm
warning: /var/tmp/rpm-xfer.MRnuo8: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 9cd4953f
package epel-release-5-3.noarch (which is newer than epel-release-1-1.ius.el5.noarch) is already installed
[root@centos5 ~]#

Hmm… no GPG key…
The second output is confusing me. Is the package just a clone of epel-release-5-3.noarch? Lets go forward to see if it is working.

“yum clean-all && yum check-update” did not show any pending updates, so far so good. Now lets try to upgrade php.


root@centos5 ~]# yum install php53
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
* addons: mirror.netcologne.de
* base: mirror.netcologne.de
* epel: mirror.andreas-mueller.com
* extras: mirror.netcologne.de
* ius: ftp.astral.ro
* updates: mirror.netcologne.de
Setting up Install Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package php53.x86_64 0:5.3.2-3.ius.el5 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: php53-common = 5.3.2-3.ius.el5 for package: php53
--> Processing Dependency: php53-cli = 5.3.2-3.ius.el5 for package: php53
--> Processing Dependency: php53-pear >= 1:1.8 for package: php53

--> Processing Conflict: php53 conflicts php < 5.3
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
php53-5.3.2-3.ius.el5.x86_64 from ius has depsolving problems
--> php53 conflicts with php
Error: php53 conflicts with php
You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
You could try running: package-cleanup --problems
package-cleanup --dupes
rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest
The program package-cleanup is found in the yum-utils package.


Correct behaviour, since it is a replacement package. After removing php (and only php) yum was complaining about more conflicts. After removing all php related packages installed to prepare for the test, needed to be removed. So the dependencies has been proper solved. Also the installation of related stock distribution packages such as “php-pgsql” has been successfully prevented.

Conclusion
The IUS community repositories are working as expected. With such a basic test I cannot promise if there are not hidden conflicts with packages between stock RHEL/CentOS packages and those from IUS. The experience on the long term will bring more clarity. I think is is sane to do some real-life tests with servers that are in an early project phase.

Further readings:

http://iuscommunity.org/

http://wiki.iuscommunity.org/

http://saferepo.iuscommunity.org/specification/

Have fun!