RE: [Openvpn-users] OpenVpn - Fedora Core 3 rpm

[Brian L. <bl...@cp...>]

Florin Andrei:

> > It's there, in both the HOWTO and INSTALL files, though the idea of 
> > putting it on the download page as well is interesting.
> 
> Yes, i betcha there are quite a few people that go to the 
> download page and then they're like "where's the RPM?" :-/
> 
> > The problem with the rpmbuild approach is that you need the -devel 
> > versions of the some of the packages as well.
> 
> True. Anyway, that's the minimum that one has to learn w.r.t. 
> re- building RPMs.
> 
> > I'm thinking with 2.0 final
> > around the corner, it might make sense to put some binary 
> RPMs on the 
> > website (including the LZO RPMs) for SuSE, RH, and FC.
> 
> Good idea.
> Dag Wieers has a pretty big FC/RH repo that carries the 
> stable openvpn releases, i'm sure he will build 2.0 packages 
> if you ping him. The nice thing is that he compiles the 
> packages on a lot of different versions of those distributions:
> 
> http://dag.wieers.com/packages/openvpn/
> 
> lzo for RH/FC can be found both on dag.wieers.com and on 
> freshrpms.net (the latter is only for FC3 but it's the only 
> one i tested):
> 
> http://dag.wieers.com/packages/lzo/
> http://heidelberg.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=977

As a newbie to OpenVPN my first question was "where are the rpms?".  It just
seems like most other packages have rpms on their download pages.

So the first time around, I just built OpenVPN from the tarball, but I had
several issues, so once I figured out how to build the rpm myself, I went
ahead & did it.  I'm glad I did, because it just seems like a much simpler
way to get OpenVPN properly installed.  I really had no trouble getting the
lzo stuff and other prerequisites installed (yum makes this a no-brainer),
and would have recommended that people to do it this way.

The only reason I would favor an rpm download, is because many people don't
want to have development tools running on a production server - particularly
one that's part of network infrastructure, and is viewed as more of an
appliance - you know, security & all that...  If you need to have a separate
development machine just to build the rpm, then that would deter many people
(even though that's not such a bad idea).  Plus, the lack of an "official"
rpm simply forces other sites (like the ones listed above) to fulfill the
need.  Personally I prefer to get my packages straight from the source.

Anyhow, that's my .02 (after taxes).

Brian Leyton
IT Manager
Commercial Petroleum Equipment