Rebuilding RPMs in RHEL

How to rebuild a RPM from source Reconfiguring and rebuilding RPMs can be immensely useful, particularly when, as in the case of AMANDA backup software, you need to make a change that is used over and over again on a lot of clients. The steps are pretty straightforward. In short: To tweak an existing package

rpm -i .src.rpm

This puts all sources into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/ and the .spec file into /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/ which you can change as required To change the compile settings Edit the /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/.spec file to meet your needs To build the binary Then run the following command to build the RPM:

rpm -bs /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/.spec

rebuilds the RPM from the modified source. -- How to rebuild the AMANDA source to create new install RPMs This is an important thing to do: AMANDA by default picks random high tcp ports on which to communicate with the clients. This is a problem when we cross subnets, in particular, since the firewall needs to know which ports are needed. So we recompile the source to include the --withtcpportrange= and --withudpportrange= switches. This will limit AMANDA to the appropriate port ranges. This is from http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/AmandaBackups 1. Download the amanda-xxxxx.src.rpm file. 2. Install the source rpm: rpm -i amanda-2xxxxx.src.rpm. This will extract the contents into your rpm directory (if you're doing it as root, it'll be /usr/src/redhat/.) 3. Edit the SPECS/amanda.spec file to reflect the appropriate changes. It's a good idea to changed the Release: tag to indicate you've made changes. In addition to just helping you keep track of what you've changed from the default, this will help keep the package from being updated automatically when you patch the system. To set up AMANDA to use specific ports that we can open up on the firewall, we want to add the following to the ./configure command. Don't forget to put the trailing back-slashes at the end of the lines.

--with-tcpportrange=50000,50100 \ --with-udpportrange=700,710

4. Rebuild the rpms:

rpmbuild -bb --define "build_rhel5 1" /amanda.spec

or for RHEL4,

rpmbuild -bb --define "build_rhel4 1" /amanda.spec