Hi! I had imperfect luck googling the best/easiest answer to this one. Maybe I just need a good "yum book/tutorial". I may have solved (poorly or OK) my "simulated challenge" (planning for an RHCE exam) which is: Let's say I had no Internet, but I did have RedHat RPM's on a local server, so doing a new-install with JUST the first boot cd, then linux askmethod (chose ftp/nfs/http, whatever the server's offering) And did the install using network'd RPMs. Later, say I wanna "yum install" something-else missed earlier, without manually pointing to RPMs. (keep using yum, without Internet). Out of the box, yum didnt adjust itself to my "askmethod" location. Tis on the RHCE exam prep list: "configure to update/install pkgs from remote repositories using yum or pup" I'll attempt (poorly,toomuch...) to finetune a more specific QUESTION: .....................How to modify the yum (config or yum.repos.d/files) IN ORDER TO: either REPLACE ( I managed this) or ADD TO (more intelligently) to use a local-network source for "base RPMs" (whatever comes on the .iso CD/DVD's , a likely RPM stash/set) Here's one answer that might be OK in the isolated situation: a) Comment OUT primary line in /etc/yum.repos.d/*file within [base] (ymmv, "baseurl" or "mirrorlist" line, look for comments/fallbacks) then b) add ONE LINE "baseurl=ftp:...", whatever the server's offering. I'll assume ==dumb to create a NEW /etc/yum.repos.d file with [base] or [??] Also assume there's better ways to solve this. ====== here's a comparison of a centOS 4 vs rhel 5 /etc/yum/repos.d : CentOS release 4.5 (Final) [doug]$ pwd /etc/yum.repos.d [doug]$ grep \\\[ * CentOS-Base.repo:[base] CentOS-Base.repo:[update] CentOS-Base.repo:[addons] CentOS-Base.repo:[extras] CentOS-Base.repo:[centosplus] CentOS-Base.repo:[contrib] CentOS-Media.repo:[c4-media] ==== centOS 5 looks the same as above/centOS4. but RHEL 5 is quite different in yum.repos.d below:=======RHEL 5 workstation: $ cat /etc/redhat-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client release 5.2 (Tikanga) [doug]$ ls /etc/yum.repos.d rhel-debuginfo.repo # ONLY ONE short FILE , # and it's ignored ("enabled=0") anyways. ## NOTE LACK OF visible [base], [updates], etc.... So there's some hidden magic here, neither in /etc/yum.conf. [doug]$ cat /etc/yum.repos.d/rhel-debuginfo.repo [rhel-debuginfo] name=Red Hat Enterprise Linux $releasever - $basearch - Debug baseurl=ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/$releasever/en/os/$basearch/Debuginfo/ enabled=0 gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-redhat-release oops, too much info. Favorite yum pointer for this topic, or just advice welcome! thx -doug