Someone reported that they were having problems using LMIShell on a RHEL 7 system – they didn’t have any of the friendly commands that we have been talking about. And they were right; the full set of LMIShell scripts that provide the friendly CLI experience are not automatically installed on RHEL 7.

LMIShell on RHEL 7 is a special case – the LMIShell infrastructure is included in RHEL 7, but many of the scripts that make LMIShell easy to use are not packaged directly in RHEL 7. Instead, they are delivered through EPEL – the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux. To effectively use LMIShell on a RHEL 7 system you need to install the EPEL repository and then install the OpenLMI Scripts from it.

One of the key characteristics of RHEL is the stability of interfaces. The OpenLMI API is stable, which allows us to include OpenLMI infrastructure and Providers in RHEL 7.

The LMIShell scripts, on the other hand, are rapidly evolving and changing. This is by design – we want the scripts to be useful, and we encourage people to modify and extend them. And hopefully submit their changes back upstream. This is a general characteristic of system management scripts; many of them change and evolve over time.

To install the full set of LMIShell scripts on a RHEL 7 system, first install the EPEL repository by going to http://mirror.pnl.gov/epel/beta/7/x86_64/repoview/epel-release.html downloading the package and installing it. This will configure your system to install packages from the EPEL for RHEL 7 repository.

Next, install LMIShell with the scripts:

#yum install 'openlmi-scripts\*'

This will install the LMIShell framework from RHEL 7 and all the LMIShell scripts from the EPEL repository. If you have already installed LMIShell it will simply install the scripts from EPEL.

To verify that the LMIShell scripts have been installed, issue the command “lmi help”. If you see a list of commands such as hwinfo, net, and storage, then the scripts are installed. You might also try “lmi hwinfo”, which will display information on the system and hardware configuration.