If you have software packages which you wish to share with others or simply between your own personal machines, a neat and easy solution is to create your own YUM repository and provide your .repo file for download.

YUM is by far the easiest method of installing software on Red hat, Centos and Fedora. Not only does it mean you don't need to trawl the web looking for somewhere to download the packages, YUM does a great job of satisfying any package dependencies. As long as the required packages are available in the enabled repositories on your system, YUM will go out and get everything you need.

To create your own YUM repository, you will need to install the yum-utils and createrepo packages:

yum install yum-utils createrepo

yum-utils contains the tools you will need to manage your soon to be created repository, and createrepo is used to create the xml based rpm metadata you will require for your repository.

Once you have installed these required tools, create a directory in your chosen web server's document root e.g:

mkdir -p /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates

Copy the rpm's you wish to host into this newly created directory.

The next step is to create the xml based rpm metadata. To create this use the createrepo program we installed earlier.

At the shell type the following command:

createrepo -v -s md5 /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates

This will create the required metadata in the repodata directory of your /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates directory.

root@test repodata]# ls -l
rwotal 44
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 28996 Jan 13 21:42 filelists.xml.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   284 Jan 13 21:42 other.xml.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1082 Jan 13 21:42 primary.xml.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   951 Jan 13 21:42 repomd.xml

To do a final consistency check on your repository run the following command:

verifytree /var/www/html/repo/recital/updates

We now have a fully functioning YUM repository for our hosted rpm packages.
The next process is to create a .repo file in the client systems /etc/yum.repos.d directory.

Navigate to the /etc/yum.repos.d directory on your system as root.

Using your preferred text editor to create the .repo file. In this example I will call it recital.repo.
Now paste in the following lines:

[Recital]
name=Recital Update Server
baseurl=http://ftp.recitalsoftware.com/repo/recital/updates
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

Once that is saved, at the shell prompt on the same machine (YUM client system).

$ yum repolist
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
repo id                  repo name                                 status
Recital                  Recital Update Server                     enabled:      1
adobe-linux-i386         Adobe Systems Incorporated                enabled:     17
fedora                   Fedora 12 - i386                          enabled: 15,366

As you can see the Recital repo is now being picked up and we have access to all the packages it is hosting.

See how easy that was!

// declare an empty dynamic array
a = array()

// declare a simple dynamic array
a = array("barry", "recital", "boston")
foreach a as value
    echo value
endfor

// declare an associative array
a = array("name" => "barry", "company" => "recital", "location" => "boston")
echo "length of a is " + len(a)
foreach a as key => value
    echo "key=" + key + ", value=" + value
endfor

In this article Barry Mavin, CEO and Chief Software Architect for Recital provides details on how to use the Recital Universal .NET Data Provider with the Recital Database Server.

Overview

A data provider in the .NET Framework serves as a bridge between an application and a data source. A data provider is used to retrieve data from a data source and to reconcile changes to that data back to the data source.

Each .NET Framework data provider has a DataAdapter object: the .NET Framework Data Provider for OLE DB is the OleDbDataAdapter object, the .NET Framework Data Provider for SQL Server is the SqlDataAdapter object, the .NET Framework Data Provider for ODBC is the OdbcDataAdapter object, and the .NET Framework Data Provider for the Recital Database Server is the RecitalDataAdapter object.

The Recital Universal .NET Data Provider can access any data sources supported by the Recital Database Server. It is not restricted to only access Recital data. It can be used to access server-side ODBC, JDBC and OLE DB data sources also.

Core classes of the Data Provider

The Connection, Command, DataReader, and DataAdapter objects represent the core elements of the .NET Framework data provider model. The Recital Universal .NET Data Provider is plug compatible with the .NET Framework Data Provider for SQL Server. All SQL Server classes are prefixed with "Sql" e.g. SqlDataAdaptor. To use the Recital Universal Data Adaptor, simply change the "Sql" prefix to "Recital" e.g. RecitalDataAdaptor.

The following table describes these objects.

Along with the core classes listed in the preceding table, a .NET Framework data provider also contains the classes listed in the following table.

The Recital Universal .NET Data Provider provides connectivity to the Recital Database Server running on any supported platform (Windows, Linux, Unix, OpenVMS) using the RecitalConnection object. The Recital Universal .NET Data Provider supports a connection string format that is similar to the SQL Server connection string format.

The basic format of a connection string consists of a series of keyword/value pairs separated by semicolons. The equal sign (=) connects each keyword and its value.

The following table lists the valid names for keyword values within the ConnectionString property of the RecitalConnection class.

Populating a DataSet from a DataAdaptor

The ADO.NET DataSet is a memory-resident representation of data that provides a consistent relational programming model independent of the data source. The DataSet represents a complete set of data including tables, constraints, and relationships among the tables. Because the DataSet is independent of the data source, a DataSet can include data local to the application, as well as data from multiple data sources. Interaction with existing data sources is controlled through the DataAdapter.

A DataAdapter is used to retrieve data from a data source and populate tables within a DataSet. The DataAdapter also resolves changes made to the DataSet back to the data source. The DataAdapter uses the Connection object of the .NET Framework data provider to connect to a data source and Command objects to retrieve data from and resolve changes to the data source.

The SelectCommand property of the DataAdapter is a Command object that retrieves data from the data source. The InsertCommand, UpdateCommand, and DeleteCommand properties of the DataAdapter are Command objects that manage updates to the data in the data source according to modifications made to the data in the DataSet.

The Fill method of the DataAdapter is used to populate a DataSet with the results of the SelectCommand of the DataAdapter. Fill takes as its arguments a DataSet to be populated, and a DataTable object, or the name of the DataTable to be filled with the rows returned from the SelectCommand.

The Fill method uses the DataReader object implicitly to return the column names and types used to create the tables in the DataSet, as well as the data to populate the rows of the tables in the DataSet. Tables and columns are only created if they do not already exist; otherwise Fill uses the existing DataSet schema.

Examples in C#:

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// include the references below
using System.Data;
using Recital.Data;

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// The following code example creates an instance of a DataAdapter that 
// uses a Connection to the Recital Database Server Southwind database 
// and populates a DataTable in a DataSet with the list of customers. 
// The SQL statement and Connection arguments passed to the DataAdapter 
// constructor are used to create the SelectCommand property of the DataAdapter.
public DataSet SelectCustomers()
{
	RecitalConnection swindConn = new
		RecitalConnection("Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=southwind");
	RecitalCommand selectCMD = new
		RecitalCommand("SELECT CustomerID, CompanyName FROM Customers", swindConn);
	selectCMD.CommandTimeout = 30;
	RecitalDataAdapter custDA = new RecitalDataAdapter();
	custDA.SelectCommand = selectCMD;
	swindConn.Open();
	DataSet custDS = new DataSet();
	custDA.Fill(custDS, "Customers");
	swindConn.Close();
	return custDS;
}

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// The following example uses the RecitalCommand, RecitalDataAdapter and 
// RecitalConnection, to select records from a database, and populate a 
// DataSet with the selected rows. The filled DataSet is then returned. 
// To accomplish this, the method is passed an initialized DataSet, a 
// connection string, and a query string that is a SQL SELECT statement
public DataSet SelectRecitalRows(DataSet dataset, string connection, string query) 
{
	RecitalConnection conn = new RecitalConnection(connection);
	SqlDataAdapter adapter = new RecitalDataAdapter();
	adapter.SelectCommand = new RecitalCommand(query, conn);
	adapter.Fill(dataset);
	return dataset;
}

Usually, you do not need to setup an email server under Linux. Most GUI email clients support Gmail POP3 and IMAP configurations. But, how do you send mail via the standard /usr/bin/mail user agents in a shell script? Programs such as sendmail / postfix / exim can be configured as a gmail smarthost but they are largely overkill for this use. The ssmtp program is a neat utility that does just that for you via gmail.