thelinuxlink.net

Hey guys.
I am listening to the show now (yeah, I am late to the party ) and thought I would post some info on the subject of caching packages for a large number of systems.

Under Debian/Ubuntu there are a few packages that will do the trick apt-mirror, apt-cacher, and apt-proxy. I am a personal fan of apt-cacher. It is easy to setup and use. You just point to the server in your /etc/apt/source.list and as apt-cacher gets requests it downloads the packages. If it already has the latest package, it sends it instead of downloading again. I have one server room with a bunch of Debian and Ubuntu systems (both are a mix of i386 and x64) and only one apt-cacher server for all of the systems; I get full network speed downloading packages off of it. Net installs of Debian with full Gnome only take 2 minutes to download all of the packages off of the apt-cacher server. I love it.

It has been a few years since I administered a Red Hat system, but when I was looking for a solution to my mirroring needs I never found a free solution that worked really well. Red Hat was willing to sell me a solution, but I didn't care for it because at the time A) it was expensive and B) It was more of a full mirror then a partial. I had no desire to host and keep in sync ~60GB of data when I had 30 nearly identical boxes that were very specialized and had only a few packages installed. So what I did was I setup one to download all the packages, then built a script to rsync the downloads across the other boxes. I still had to individually run updates, but at least they wouldn't download the packages again. Though if I had any more servers, this could have been a nightmare PITA.

Hope this helps!

~Stack~

Being just an amateur at this, do not listen to me. Actually i think createrepo and the associated commands will do the job. It is a matter of getting all the packages and keys with curl or whatever then do a net install. Without a repo, I would do a loop mount with the original rh install media and point that to a ftp, tftp, or a www share then do a net install first to see if that would work. later you could always add the other packages and files from the media to a share to use. But I am sure that has been thought of. I think you can do it that way with Fedora. There was a magazine article about it way back when. I will have to look for it. There is a way to remote boot into a network install client on the remote machine with a vnc server so you can use a vnc client to remotely control the whole install.saves a lot of sneakernet work. I know i have done that with centos. install several servers at the same time from any point. If available the lowest paid employees can go put the hardware in place after you have preset the hardware for pxeboot. No media to carry around. Then again he probably knows that.

You know that you could set up a thin client server to dole out diskless rh servers via pxe/gpxe (thin client system can even be setup from around the world using gpxe and http(s)) by mac address and using iscsi file systems shares for storage to never have to install anything again except once. (at least as not as much) Never a sneakernet isnstall/reinstall, just a etherwake and or remote reboot.

With VMware you should be able to pxeboot into a client that accesses a virtual machine that acts as if it was local and not have to even use the iscsi. Unless there is a network continuity or security issue. But then, I am just an amateur who does not know anything.