How can I build a binary RPM package for my specific Linux platform?
NOTE: this article may contain outdated information which may not be applicable with modern versions of RPM build tools.
Building an OpenVPN binary RPM package requires these RPM prerequisites:
- openssl
- openssl-devel
- lzo
- lzo-devel
The openssl package is almost always installed by default on Linux distributions. The openssl-devel package is almost always available on Linux distributions, but is sometimes not installed by default. The lzo and lzo-devel packages are usually included in more recent Linux distributions but must be installed manually. See the Dag Wieers site for a comprehensive set of LZO RPMs for Red Hat and Fedora.
Once the prerequisite binary RPMs are in place, building an OpenVPN binary RPM is quite straightforward:
rpmbuild -tb [OpenVPN .tar.gz file]
You will see a lot of lines of output as rpmbuild compiles OpenVPN, but check near the end of the output for a line which looks like this:
Wrote: /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i586/openvpn-2.0_rc18-1.i586.rpm
This tells you where rpmbuild wrote the binary RPM file. Now, use:
rpm -ivh [OpenVPN .rpm file]
to do a fresh install of OpenVPN, or
rpm -Uvh [OpenVPN .rpm file]
to upgrade an existing installation.