Mandriva urpmi sucks

[root@localhost]# urpmi.addmedia --probe-hdlist opennms-stable http://yum.opennms.org/stable/mandriva2009/ --verbose
getting exclusive lock on urpmi
adding medium "opennms-stable"
...retrieving failed: wget failed: exited with 1

no metadata found for medium "opennms-stable"
unlocking urpmi database
[root@localhost]# 

<sarcasm>Wow, that error message was so amazingly helpful. Thanks!</sarcasm>

Even with verbose mode enabled, it doesn’t tell me exactly what it was that failed to be retrieved. Was it an index file of some sort? In fact, verbose only added the stupid lock message. Asshats.

Dear urpmi maintainers: Please fix your sucky program. And don’t get all pissy and say it’s because I’m an n00b (I am, but only to Mandriva and urpmi. I’ve been doing this computer thing longer than you’ve been alive, probably).

While I’m being all pissy, why hasn’t someone written a basic OSS network monitoring app for us small business users? WhyTF do I have to go with some huge “enterprise” app, or one that’s too new and flaky, or one that’s too old and hard to configure, or one that requires that I load a special agent on each system? (Guys, that’s what SNMP is for.)

Yeah, I know, I could write it myself, but I have other thing to do besides write an SNMP monitor. I’ll probably end up doing just that anyway. Ruby SNMP looks interesting. Wow, if the guy that wrote Mint would only take a stab at SNMP.

UPDATE 2008-10-28 #1: --no-md5sum is the key! In looking at the OpenNMS distro directories, there were three files: hdlist.cz, synthesis.hdlist.cz, and pubkey in the media_info directory. I also poked around in the shell script that is urpmi, and saw a --debug option, for “very verbose mode”. I ran that, found that urpmi is bailing because it can’t find an MD5SUM file in the media_info directory. So you have to run urpmi with the --no-md5sum option so it will ignore that it’s missing. Six days later, the media files for OpenNMS are now added. Hopefully, I can get OpenNMS installed.

UPDATE 2008-10-28 #2: Keeps getting better. I had to dig around and manually install jdk for java 1.5, because the one in the OpenNMS distros wont donwload because it looks like they’re named wrong or something (looking for jdk-1.5.0_15-fcs.i586), which is because there is this non-included jicmp program, that is written by the OpenNMS folks. GRRRR! The current jicmp (1.0.8) isn’t in an RPM package on sourceforge, so I had to go with 1.0.6 that I found at a random (yeah, I know) site. Amazingly, now that the jicmp requirement is satisfied, OpenNMS is finally installing. Well, the other dependencies are, like postresql. More to follow…

UPDATE 2008-10-28 #3: OMFG. It’s installed:

Preparing...                     #############################################
      1/6: opennms-core          #############################################
- making symlink for /opt/opennms/logs... done
- making symlink for /opt/opennms/share... done
- moving *.sql.rpmnew files (if any)... done
- checking for old update files... done

 *** Installation complete.  You must still run the installer and
 *** make a few other changes before you start OpenNMS.  See the
 *** install guide and release notes for details.

      2/6: libpq8.3_5            #############################################
      3/6: postgresql8.3         #############################################
      4/6: postgresql8.3-server  #############################################
      5/6: opennms-webapp-jetty  #############################################
      6/6: opennms               #############################################

I don’t know what to do with myself! I think I’ll do the config/install tomorrow. Hopefully the 1.0.6 version of jicmp won’t be a show-stopper. If it is, I’ll just compile 1.0.8 from source. More later!

UPDATE 2008-10-29 #4: Okay, got ahead of myself. plpgsql is not installed, so installed it. Now the OpenNMS installer runs completely. Tomcat servlet isn’t installed, so installing that (along with its 50+ dependencies). More to come.

UPDATE 2008-10-29 #5: In the spirit of Halloween, just let me say…

It’s ALIIIIIEEEVVVVEEE!!!

Manually editing the auto-discovery xml file thingy didn’t do anything that I could see, but doing auto-discovery from within the web UI did. Now to play!