Installing RPMs from Remote Systems

With the RPM system, you can even specify package locations similar to an Internet address, in URL format. For example, if you want to apply the rpm command to the foo.rpm package on the /pub directory of the ftp.rpmdownloads.com FTP server, you can install this package with a command such as:

# rpm -ivh ftp://ftp.rpmdownloads.com/pub/foo.rpm

Assuming you're connected to the Internet, this particular rpm command logs onto the FTP server anonymously and downloads the file.

If the FTP servers requires a username and password, you can use the following format:

ftp://username:password@hostname:port/path/to/
remote/package/file.rpm

where username and password are the username and password you need to log on to this system, and port, if required, specifies a nonstandard port used on the remote FTP server. Naturally, transmitting passwords in clear text over a network is discouraged, so anonymous FTP servers may be preferred.

If the username is paul and the password is Ila451MS, you could install an RPM directly from a server with the following command:

# rpm -ivh ftp://paul:Ila451MS@ftp.rpmdownloads.com/pub/foo.rpm

The key to this system is the rpm command. Even over a network, it works with globbing; in other words, if you don't know the version number, you can replace it with a *:

# rpm -ivh ftp://paul:Ila451MS@ftp.rpmdownloads.com/pub/foo-*

Later, we'll see how to validate the signature associated with an RPM and verify the files in a specific package.