Strange RPM Dependency Observed In CentOS 7

Home » CentOS » Strange RPM Dependency Observed In CentOS 7
CentOS 5 Comments

Hello,

can someone explain, why the two packages
–  GeoIP
–  geoipupdate are needed when installing the bind-utils package?

yum install bind-utils
…
========================================================================================================================
 Package                        Arch                   Version                               Repository            Size
========================================================================================================================
Installing:
 bind-utils                     x86_64                 32:9.11.4-26.P2.el7_9.2               base                 260 k Installing for dependencies:
 GeoIP                          x86_64                 1.5.0-14.el7                          base                 1.5 M
 bind-libs                      x86_64                 32:9.11.4-26.P2.el7_9.2               base                 157 k
 bind-libs-lite                 x86_64                 32:9.11.4-26.P2.el7_9.2               base                 1.1 M
 bind-license                   noarch                 32:9.11.4-26.P2.el7_9.2               base                  90 k
 geoipupdate                    x86_64                 2.5.0-1.el7                           base                  35 k

Transaction Summary
========================================================================================================================
Install  1 Package (+5 Dependent packages)
…

Thanks,

Walter

5 thoughts on - Strange RPM Dependency Observed In CentOS 7

  • The bind-utils package requires ‘libGeoIP.so.1()(64bit)’, which is provided by the GeoIP package. The GeoIP package requires
    ‘geoipupdate’, which is provided by the geoipupdate package.

    % rpm -q –requires bind-utils|grep GeoIP
    libGeoIP.so.1()(64bit)
    % rpm -q –requires GeoIP | grep geoipupdate geoipupdate

    GeoIP provides a C library and a lookup tool to look up countries from an IP address. The bind-utils executables are all linked against libGeoIP.so.1, so I assume they use some functionality from that library.

    /usr/bin/geoipupdate is a tool to update the data files in the GeoIP
    package.

  • Looking at the source, it looks like the geoip-related functions are only called in the ‘named’ code and the libdns library. I don’t see any features in dig, host or nslookup for looking up countries based on IP. However, the GeoIP package has a ‘geoiplookup’ command that looks up a country from an IP.

  • dependency of neither GeoIP nor geoipupdate, like it is in CentOS 6?

    (on systems where the bind-utils are used, mostly no GeoIP is used – DNS
    vs. Web)

    Thanks,

    Walter

  • Maybe .. but we don’t design things .. we build source code. That is not a decision CentOS Linux makes.