[Yum] Multiple machines & timeliness of updates.

Harvey J. Stein hjstein at covad.net
Fri Dec 5 03:50:46 UTC 2003


I just installed yum on a RH9 system because I was tired of waiting to
connect to RHN.  It works quite nicely.  Thanks.

None the less, two issues have come up.  One is that I have 2
machines.  With up2date, I was able to easily set it up so that I
didn't have to download things more than once.  I did this by NFS
mounting /var/spool/up2date on the 2nd machine.  I would update the
1st machine with up2date configured to not delete the downloaded RPMs.
Then I'd update the 2nd machine, which would see the RPMs in the NFS
mounted /var/spool/up2date, so it wouldn't download them again.  The
2nd machine is configured to delete RPMs after installation.  Thus,
the RPMs would be around for as long as necessary, and would get
cleaned up at the end (except for pkgs on the 1st machine that aren't
on the 2nd, which I'd periodically clean up manually).  This scales to
N machines by only configuring 1 to delete rpms, and always updating
that machine last.

I saw the thread in the mailing list on this topic, but didn't see any
solutions as clean as this.

I'd be able to do the same with yum if either a) it didn't keep
universal stuff (namely the downloaded RPMs, header data, etc) in the
same directory as machine specific stuff, or b) it at least named the
machine specific stuff in a machine specific way so that the download
directory could be shared.  Ideally, when downloading it would just
make a mirror of the part of the repository it's downloading, which
other machines in turn could chain off of.  Any possibility of this
making it into a future release?  If no one else is interested in
this, would a patch for something along these lines at least be
accepted?

The other issue is speed of updates.  up2date shows me that
rsync-2.5.7-0.9 is now available, but yum isn't pulling it down.  My
(unchanged, stock) yum.conf shows:

   http://mirror.dulug.duke.edu/pub/yum-repository/redhat/updates/$releasever/

as my default update repository.  Taking a look at

   http://mirror.dulug.duke.edu/pub/yum-repository/redhat/updates/9/x86/i386/

I see that rsync-2.5.7-0.9.i386.rpm just showed up ~2 hrs ago.  But,
there's no header file for it in

   http://mirror.dulug.duke.edu/pub/yum-repository/redhat/updates/9/headers/

Judging from the file dates in the latter directory, it appears that
the headers are only regenerated once a day.  Is this the case?  Any 
possibility of getting the headers updated as the RPMs arrive?  Are
there any mirror repositories around that do that?

Thanks,

-- 
Harvey J. Stein
hjstein at covad.net



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