Automatically installing 32-bit libraries on 64-bit machine? (RHEL3)

[Drew Leske]

Hi all,

We're using KickStart for clusters and Linux deployment in general, and for 
the most part we are happy with this.  Recently however we have acquired 
some 64-bit machines to be added into our cluster and there are some issues 
here.

We would like to make these resources available for 64-bit computing, and 
have therefore installed primarily 64-bit libraries on them.  However, most 
of our users run 32-bit applications.  At this point there is not enough 
need for exclusively 64-bit machines, but I would like to make the platform 
available.

According to a colleague there is a way with yum to specify that whenever 
installing a package, a 32-bit version of the package, if available, will be 
installed.  I am not familiar with yum and am limited to RHEL3, up2date, and 
rpm, but this is the functionality I am looking for.

I have looked at the documentation for KickStart (RHEL3 and RHEL4) as well 
as browser this mailing list for information, and of course I've searched 
the web--nada.  Does anybody have any suggestions for how to handle this?

Thanks,
Drew.

-- 
Drew Leske :: Systems Group/Unix, Computing Services, University of Victoria
   dleske at uvic.ca / +1250 472 5055 (office) / +1250 588 4311 (cel)