Question: How Do You Get Yum Repositories to Work with a AWS Instance of RHEL?
Problem scenario: You are using RedHat Linux via AWS and very few yum commands work. The repositories are very limited, and few packages are available. When trying to use yum to install packages, you see output like this:
"Loaded plugins: amazon-id, rhui-lb
...
No package lynx available.
Error: Nothing to do"
It may seem like you need to register a RedHat subscription (separate from your AWS account) to enable more yum repositories to be available. You do not know the corresponding credentials for an rhnreg_ks or rhn_register command. It seems as though your server has not been configured to use the Red Hat Update Infrastructure. You do not want to manually download various .rpms to the server. You may have contemplated setting up a RedHat satellite server to get your yum repositories to work like you think they should. You do not know why it seems this complex and difficult to get some common RedHat packages with the "yum install" command. What do you do to have yum commands install packages and their dependencies?
Solution
Run this command to enable optional channels:
sudo yum-config-manager --enable rhui-REGION-rhel-server-extras rhui-REGION-rhel-server-optional