ike-scan available from Build Service (and how I built my first RPM package)

ike-scan is now available for openSUSE from my personal repository on openSUSE Build Service. I decided to provide a package for this network security tool because my wife needed it for her job, and had asked me why no one had provided an RPM package for this tool on openSUSE.

This was also the first time I ever built any RPM package on my own. There was a lot of tutorials all over the web on how to build RPM packages, but many were either very outdated or didn’t give me enough info to fully understand the RPM packaging process (or I was just having a bad Google karma). I ended up wasting more time than I had wanted out of my precious Saturday family time, but eventually got the package to build. (Yay for me!)

What’s more cool, though, is the Build Service that openSUSE project provides. The Build Service basically provides a convenient way to build and host RPM packages for multiple distros, not just openSUSE but other distros like Fedora, RHEL, Debian and Ubuntu, while all you have to do is to provide the source tarball and a spec file. There is even a wizard to create a spec file from a tarball (though you probably have to review and edit it once it’s auto-generated).

Anyway, I have to say it was quite fascinating to watch it automatically build multiple packages for different distros after each spec file edit, and make them automatically available in the repository once the build is finished. This site is way, way cool!