RHEL is Evil

...or at least our installation of it is evil. It seems that our RHEL box has everything installed FROM SOURCE (potentially) and not from RPMs as would be proper. At the very least, I would love to run up2date, but the system isn't registered. Go figure.

This creates a situation affectionately known as "dependency hell".

I've had the pressure on to get an application into production, but it seems that everytime I try to install the packages I need, either from source, or RPM or from SRPM, it's missing something. The worst was a circular chain of dependencies that stemmed from the bash shell, which happens to already be on the system, just not in RPM form.

I know for a fact that a lot of these packages are there, but without the RPM registry correctly populated, I have no bloody idea whether they're ACTUALLY there.

When we do the website redesign, I'm going to push for a complete wipe and reinstall of the server. Apparently, it's the only way.

*sigh* Back to the grindstone.