Description of problem: Prior to rhns-proxy-package-manager-1.2.4-3 (when rhn_package_manager was still in the rhn_package_manager package) users could execute rhn_package_manager independant of having root access. This was fantastic and much more secure when you have channel administrators you don't want having the root password to your RHN proxy. It also meant each users's $HOME/.rhn_package_manager would be obeyed, and the new version does not appear to honor the packageDir directive in /etc/rhn/default/rhn_proxy_package_manager.conf. When will you be changing the program to let people other than root execute it, and what's the right directive for the old packageDir? The default /var/up2date path is not going to work for us. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. execute rhn_package_manager Additional info:
We tried to unify the configurations for rhn_package_manager and the proxy; rhn_package_manager should use the same configuration options as the proxy. The old packageDir directive should be pkg_dir in /etc/rhn/rhn.conf. Please do file a bug if this does not happen(against RHN/Proxy, and/or feel free to assign it to me directly. This bug got into RHN/Channels, and I'm not the owner of this component). We felt that the simplicity of one configuration file would be a better approach, rather than having multiple config files, one for proxy and one for the package manager, doing pretty much the same thing. At that point we also enforced the root check. Again, if this is too inconvenient for people at large, we'll find an intermediate solution (i.e. any user can upload, and look for a ~/.rhn.conf file before reading /etc/rhn/rhn.conf).
Hindsight is 20/20, but maybe there could be some solicitation of input on things like check-root. Please consider this a request to change it back. It's awfully frustrating in a multi-admin and NIS+ environment. Thanks for the information about pkgdir!
er, pkg_dir.
I copied /etc/rhn/default/rhn_proxy_package_manager.conf to /etc/rhn/rhn_proxy_package_manager.conf and made the pkg_dir addition, which didn't appear to work - rhn_package_manager is still copying the headers to the default '/var/up2date/...' path. Why might this be happening?
Short answer: don't do that. All the settings, for everything proxy side, are in /etc/rhn/rhn.conf. rhn_package_manager reads that file to get pkg_dir. Under normal circumstances, pkg_dir should be already set for the proxy, so rhn_package_manager piggybacks on the proxy's configuration. rhn_package_manager also has a -p (or --printconf) option to print the configuration it's gonna use.
It works, and looking back reading your instructions seems clean, but at the time seemed ambiguous. (There's already a setting in rhn.conf for _a_ "pkg_dir", but not _the_ "pkg_dir".)