Foreman / Katello and IBMs latest adoption of yum and rpm for AIX

Don’t know how many follow IBM and their latest AIX news. In the past year or so, they have started to move towards using yum (albeit in a very grotesque fashion) for managing and deploying rpms on IBM AIX

I’ve been kicking around the idea of standing up a Foreman / Katello instance to attempt to manage these ppc repositories, and was curious if anyone out there has started messing with this.

They’ve set up their repository here though its in a slightly different format than most linux repositories it seems.
ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/aix/freeSoftware/aixtoolbox/RPMS/ppc/

Anyone have any thoughts on the feasibility of this? or experience with?

Thanks… Hoping I might be able to use this to start contributing to Foreman if there’s a need, since I’ve been a user for so long.

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I think that most of us are not following AIX but in general we welcome more diversity in the ecosystem. For the repository management Katello mostly relies on Pulp. Not sure if we have a lot of pulp devs on this forum or if you need to ask on pulp-dev. @Justin_Sherrill1 is typically the person who’d know where to start.

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So this was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Able to create Product and repos in Foreman/Katello and import the contents from IBM’s yum repositories. Still working out the client side, but can perform Remote Execution against AIX 7.2 LPARS (no big deal really since its just ssh), and looks like we can make use of the chef hooks for chef runs if we choose.

Just need to get rpm/yum working correctly on the AIX side , it’s an IBM issue w/ rpms.
This may lead me down a road of managing a few thousand AIX systems w/ Foreman. Strange Days

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Yeah, i meant to say that looking at the repo it looks just like a normal yum repo. The packages are laid out a bit differently, but as long as they are referenced correctly, it should sync fine! Glad to hear it did!

Well, that sounds like a blog post in the making, hint hint :wink:

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