rootninja

I don’t understand why some people think this is a complicated thing to set up, so here goes my approach which I think is the easiest method.  Perhaps you’re behind a very restrictive corporate firewall or you want to conserve bandwidth when you’re setting up several machines.  You can set up your own repositories on one machine in your network and have it download the packages and updates in the off-hours.  Whenever a client machine on your network wants updates, they’ll get them much faster and you’ll save bandwidth too.

Step-by-step:

Install createrepo on the machine you want to be your update server.

[user@hostname ~]$ sudo yum install createrepo

Now you’ll create a few crons to create and maintain your mirror.  Let’s start with the one that does the grunt work of downloading the packages.  I’ll go ahead and set a bandwidth limit and log my mirroring.  I don’t care about debug stuff so i’ll exclude that and any iso’s that may get dumped in there too.

#!/bin/sh
# GET THE LATEST PACKAGES
/usr/bin/rsync -aq –bwlimit=500 –stats –log-file=/var/log/rsync/i386.rsync.1.log rsync://your-favorite-linux-mirror/linux/updates/9/i386.newkey/ –exclude=debug/ –exclude=*.iso /opt/yum/updates/8/i386/
/usr/bin/rsync -aq –bwlimit=500 –stats –log-file=/var/log/rsync/x86_64.rsync.1.log rsync://your-favorite-linux-mirror/linux/updates/9/x86_64.newkey/ –exclude=debug/ –exclude=*.iso /opt/yum/updates/8/x86_64/

Create a cron to update your repo as new rpms get mirrored.

#!/bin/sh
# CREATE/MAINTAIN MY LOCAL REPOSITORY
/usr/bin/createrepo –update /opt/yum/base/8/i386
/usr/bin/createrepo –update /opt/yum/base/8/x86_64

Create another cron to rotate your logs, saving the last week’s worth.

#!/bin/sh
# ROTATE THE LOGS
rm -f /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log7.tar.gz
mv -f /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log6.tar.gz /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log7.tar.gz
mv -f /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log5.tar.gz /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log6.tar.gz
mv -f /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log4.tar.gz /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log5.tar.gz
mv -f /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log3.tar.gz /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log4.tar.gz
mv -f /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log2.tar.gz /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log3.tar.gz
mv -f /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log1.tar.gz /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log2.tar.gz
mv -f /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log.tar.gz /var/log/rsync/yum-rsync-log1.tar.gz
tar -czf /tmp/yum-rsync-log.tar.gz /var/log/rsync/*.log
rm -rf /var/log/rsync/*.log
mv -f /tmp/yum-rsync-log.tar.gz /var/log/rsync/

On your client machines, move or delete the existing repo definitions and create a new one that points to your local repositories.  Assuming your server machine’s IP address is 192.168.1.2 and you’re using Fedora your new repo definitions would look something like this:

[fairfield-base]
name=My_Local_Repo - base - Fedora $releasever - $basearch
failovermethod=priority
baseurl=http://192.168.1.2/yum/base/$releasever/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

[fairfield-updates]
name=My_Local_Repo - updates - Fedora $releasever - $basearch
failovermethod=priority
baseurl=http://192.168.1.2/yum/updates/$releasever/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

Wait until your cron fills your repositories or download a few packages and run your createrepo.  From now on your updates will execute much faster.  And if you want to build new machines, you can point your kickstart to get packages from your local mirror instead of just your cdrom so you can build machines that are fully up to date right out of the box.  Try updating on your clients.  You should notice it takes ten times longer to install the updates than it does to download them.

[user@hostname ~]$ sudo yum update

Linux Linux, packages, repo, rpm, rsync, server, updates, yum