Rebuilding source rpms
There are a few Dell servers that I administer at work. these servers are running SLES 9 SP2, but they don't have the Dell hardware management agents installed, so given that these are production servers we won't see any hardware issues until it's too late. But, I couldn't install the management agents because the running kernel is a security update version pushed out by Novell and I need the kernel source files which, of course weren't installed along with the kernel.
The kernel source on the SP2 CD is too old, and the one on the SP3 CD is too new, so for a long while the only way to get the agent installed would be for me to upgrade to SP3 since I couldn't find the source file for the kernel anywhere. This wouldn't be a problem except that upgrading to SP3 would require a reboot to start running the newer kernel, and a reboot means downtime which means scheduling the reboot for the middle of the night, or a Saturday, which happen to be times that I'd rather not be working.
All that changed today, when I came across the source rpm for the running kernel on Novell's website. That gave me the ability to rebuild the source rpm into a binary rpm and install the binary rpm on all the servers running said kernel. Now, I can installed the dell management agents without any downtime, or discomfort to my personal life.
Here is the relevant command:
rpmbuild --nodeps --rebuild --clean source.src.rpm
You can then find the binary rpm in /usr/src/packages/RPMS/ on a SuSE machine.
