Topic: rpms

[Daniel]

[root@$hostname /root]# rpm -i redir-2.0-1.i386.rpm
error: redir-2.0-1.i386.rpm cannot be installed

and

[root@$hostname /root]# rpm -i ipmasqadm-0.4.2-3.i386.rpm
error: ipmasqadm-0.4.2-3.i386.rpm cannot be installed

Why ?

Thanks in advance.

I'm running e-smith server and gateway 4.0

[Jason Miller]

There is a possibility that it is failing because it doesn't recognize the format.

Make sure you download the .rpm files in binary format, I've had troubles with that before and they threw the same error I think.

[Daniel]

i have downloaded the rpm with DAP and with standard Ie5 downloader. So i do not think it is because of binary.

Does Anyone Has any idea ?

It's very stranged and i Would like to forward some ports very much!!

Please help me !

Daniel

[Webgeek]

Try rpm -ivh rpm-name.rpm

Thta should give you a more detailed error message.

[Daniel]

It seems that downloading in ie5 went well but tranferring the file over ftp to the server and gateway didn't go well because of the binary thing.

Could someone explain to me in short what binary is ? And the relation to ftp transfers. I don't get it 100% i think.

Daniel

[Jason Miller]

I'll take a shot at this:

there are two possible modes of file transfers; binary and ascii.

ascii is just straight ascii (or text), while binary includes all sorts of system characters and that is why reading the contents of a binary file are impossible from a human standpoint - its almost all machine code.

an .rpm package is binary, because its machine code.

ftp, which transfers files, runs in either mode.  if you were sending new template or .txt files over to the e-smith server and gateway then it would make sense to use ascii mode, but sending the .rpm would require binary mode.

from your ftp client, to switch between modes you type
binary        -> returns "200 Type set to I."
ascii      -> returns "200 Type set to A."

I think it should default to binary, but not all ftp clients do that and hence you originally transferred the files onto the e-smith server in ascii mode.

hope that helps a bit.

[Charlie Brady]

Jason Miller wrote:

> ascii is just straight ascii (or text)

The real issue is end of line conventions, and automatic conversion of same.

DOS derived systems store text files with carriage return-linefeed pairs between each line of text and Unix derived systems use only linefeed between lines of text. In text mode, ftp auto-converts from one to t'other. When this happens to a binary file, the file breaks. So it's important when transferring binary bines to use binary mode, so that linesfeeds are not expanded to carriage return-linefeed pairs or carriage return-linesfeed pairs to just linefeed.

Charlie

[Daniel]

Wow! learned a lot today.

Thanks !

Daniel