Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Here you can find information about
fou4s errors,
known bugs
and how to setup a
network download server.
This is a list of error messages from fou4s, that cause users to
be confused or frustrated. Hopefully, some explanation helps :-)
- What are packman/supplementary updates?
Fou4s is capable of downloading packages from other sources than YOU.
You can specify an rsync server (sorry - no HTTP/FTP!), and fou4s will search
all RPM files there, generated patch descriptions and process them like
normal updates. See /etc/fou4s.conf and look for the commented "Server="
lines as examples.
To answer the original question: Packman infos can be found at
http://packman.links2linux.de/.
Supplementary updates are from SuSE. See also fou4s(1) for information.
- A script was found, what shall I do?
Currently the script-"packages" provided by SuSE are used to download
truetype fonts or nvidia drivers, that can't be installed from CD because of
legal issues. Scripts require interactive mode of fou4s, because fou4s
can't know if you really want to install nvidia drivers or truetype fonts.
You can also choose not to run the script using the skip (s) option when
running fou4s --interactive.
If you want to run the script, although it was skipped before, delete the
appropriate line from /var/cache/fou4s/skipped-packages.$HOSTNAME.$suseversion
- WARNING: different versioning scheme: foo: 1.2.1 > 1.0 = true
This means, that the structure of the version from the old package is
different from the new package. The true or false indictates the guess of
fou4s, if the other version number is newer or not. If you get this warning
with "= false" at the end (and fou4s guesses right), you can put the
specific package on the IgnoreList in fou4s.conf to suppress the Warning.
- [: too many arguments
This is a bug in fou4s. Please send me the output of
bash -vx fou4s --ri <your options> &>fou.log
- gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found. the signature could not be verified
The fou4s build key was not imported into your keyring (or if you are running
fou4s as root on SuSE >= 8.0: the RPM keyring). This should not happen, please
tell me exactly how you installed fou4s!
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Fou4s can't be perfect ...
- Current business products have more than one update tree (e.g. CORE9 +
SLES9 + SDK). Currently there is no possibility to check all those trees
because SUSEPRODUCT is handled as a single entity within fou4s.
As a workaround, you can tell fou4s to use a different config file for
the other two trees or run it with --product=XXX multiple times.
- Autodetection of SuSE business products may fail in some cases
If you get 404 errors, you have to supply SuSEProduct and SuSEVersion in
fou4s.conf. Please tell me, which business product you are using.
Please note, that normal update servers don't contain business product
updates, you must use fou4s --server -w to get an updated list of servers
containing business product updates. Currently, there is only one server
available for business products: sdb.suse.de (see fou4s.conf).
- Packages from other directories require an rsync server
Non-update packages can only be downloaded, if the server supports rsync.
Rsync is used to get recursive directory listings. Fou4s converts this
listing to patch descriptions, that can be used for comparison. One of the
servers given with Server= must be an rsync server to make this work.
See /etc/fou4s.conf for examples (packman, supplementary updates).
- FTP servers can't be used over a proxy
Sorry, wget can't read the index pages generated by most proxies. Maybe
some day fou4s will be capable of reading such a html index for wget.
- Installation of pending patches does not work
A pending patch means, that there are e.g. 5 updates in an update description,
but not all of them are installed on the system. If the update description
contains "UpdateOnlyInstalled = false", and the -a option is given, pending
patches cannot be installed.
- Failed http downloads don't cause an error message from fou4s
There seems to be a bug in wget, returning 0 (ok) as return value, if the
-r (recursive) option is specified. Fou4s uses -r for http servers, so
there may be no "Download failed" message, if something wrong happens with
downloads from a http server (during fou4s -u).
- Can I update from SuSE 8.1 to 8.2?
No, fou4s cannot do cross-distribution upgrades for you. This is also not
possible via YOU, so I don't feel bad ;-) Use YaST if you want to do this
(as I do), or try apt4rpm from http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/.
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How to use fou4s in a networked environment (more than one machine
uses an update tree).
- How to setup a multi-server update tree (r/w)
The easiest solution is to share /var/cache/fou4s of the master machine
via nfs (read/write) and mount it at the same position on the clients.
The master machine is the first that runs fou4s --auto at night. The slave
machines run fou4s --auto a little bit later. Fou4s will only download
packages, that are not installed on the master server.
- How to setup a multi-server update tree (r/o)
On installations with only a few different clients (e.g. lots of SuSE 8.2
machines with the same packages installed), you can use fou4s --auto --host x
for one of them, additionally to the normal fou4s --auto call. Repeat the
fou4s --auto --host call for each host with different packages. If there are
too many different hosts, you can also run fou4s --auto --all to download
the packages (maybe several times with different --suseversion) and then
fou4s -e on the slave machines (of course a little bit later). The CacheDir
on the slave machines must be set to a local directory. The RpmPath must
point to the directory mounted from the server.
- Older SuSE versions can't download packages for SuSE 8.1 and later
Unfortunately the patch description file format has changed, and the path
of the package on the update server cannot be determined any more.
To perform downloads, the missing information (arch) is retrieved from
the file /var/adm/YaST/InstSrcManager/IS_CACHE_0x00000001/DATA/descr/
packages.
If you run fou4s on another machine that downloads for several SuSE servers
with --all, copy the given file from an 8.1 machine into the same directory
on the download machine.
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