XeonBD’s Fedora EPEL public mirror is now live in our Bangladesh data center for our Bangladeshi data center users and also for the public usage.
So, those who are hosting their RHEL/CentOS/etc server (VPS, Cloud Server, Dedicated Server, Colocation etc) in XeonBD’s Bangladesh data center now they can use our Fedora EPEL public mirror for their RHEL/CentOS/etc server to update/install any packages of Fedora EPEL directly from the Fedora mirror hosted in our Bangladesh data center.
The address of our Fedora EPEL’s mirror server is http://mirror.xeonbd.com/fedora-epel/
The EPEL repository is an additional package repository that provides easy access to install packages for commonly used software. This repo was created because Fedora contributors wanted to use Fedora packages they maintain on RHEL and other compatible distributions.
To put it simply the goal of this repo was to provide greater ease of access to software on Enterprise Linux compatible distributions.
Join our mirror community group at https://www.fb.com/groups/bdmirror
we need your support and feedback to deliver the open source resources to the Bangladeshi people.
What’s an ‘EPEL repository’?
The EPEL repository is managed by the EPEL group, which is a Special Interest Group within the Fedora Project. The ‘EPEL’ part is an abbreviation that stands for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux. The EPEL group creates, maintains, and manages a high-quality set of additional packages. These packages may be software not included in the core repository, or sometimes updates that haven’t been provided yet.
The EPEL repository can be used with the following Linux Distributions:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
- CentOS
- Scientific Linux
- Oracle Linux
Enabling the EPEL repo
Enabling the EPEL repo will differ slightly depending on which OS you are enabling it from. Overall the installation process for EPEL should be pretty straight forward, there are some distros that make it even easier though! At XeonBD the only distribution that this will apply to is CentOS; however, we’ll also cover the process for RHEL.
Pre-flight Check:
- These instructions were created with XeonBD servers in mind.
- Root level command line access via SSH will be necessary to follow along.
Installing EPEL on CentOS via yum
By far CentOS is the easiest distro to install EPEL on. The CentOS distribution includes a repo called ‘CentOS Extras’ by default. Within this repo users can find an EPEL package, so in this case, enabling EPEL is as easy as installing any other package.
- Connect to the server via SSH as the root user; or open a terminal if you’re working locally.
- Install the EPEL repository with the following command: sudo yum install epel-release
- Confirm your work and refresh the repo list by running: sudo yum repolist
Essentially once you’re logged in as the root user, just run the following command:
To get a list of countries currently serving mirrors use the command
sudo yum install epel-release
Once you hit enter Yum will do some work and prompt you with a confirmation dialog. once you confirm the installation and hit enter it will complete the installation process for you. That’s it, it’s really that simple.
If for whatever reason, your version of CentOS is missing the CentOS Extras repo necessary for this to work you can follow the directions below.
Installing EPEL on RHEL/CentOS/etc
If you are running a different supported distribution you can install the EPEL rep with the following method. This method should also work on CentOS if you’d like to do a manual install. First, start by running the following command:
cd /tmp
Then download the rpm file for installation. The file download depends on what OS version you are using, select from the list below:
- RHEL 7/CentOS 7/etc:
wget http://mirror.xeonbd.com/fedora-epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
- RHEL 6/CentOS 6/etc:
wget http://mirror.xeonbd.com/fedora-epel/epel-release-latest-6.noarch.rpm
Once you’ve downloaded the EPEL rpm file for your OS version, you can now install the EPEL repository. To install the EPEL rpm run:
yum install ./epel-release-latest-*.noarch.rpm
What is a mirror website?
A mirror site is a website or set of files on a computer server that has been copied to another computer server so that the site or files are available from more than one place. A mirror site has its own URL but is otherwise identical to the principal site. Load-balancing devices allow high-volume sites to scale easily, dividing the work between multiple mirror sites.
A mirror site is usually updated frequently to ensure it reflects the contents of the original site. In some cases, the original site may arrange for a mirror site at a larger location with a higher speed connection and, perhaps, a closer proximity to a large audience.
