[Yum] Multiple Repository Hell

[seth vidal]

On Tue, 2003-03-11 at 14:44, Erik Williamson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> It's looking like our department may start running the systems for the
> whole faculty of science (and the university?!?), and I'm faced with
> providing a way to patch 'em all.
> 
> We've been sucessfully using yum (& a whack of scripts) for a year now
> for just the Comp. Sci. machines, but now...  We're wondering what ways
> you have come up with to have different repositories for different
> departments (Seth, looking at you...).
> 
> I'm currently working on a script for setting symlinks from our mirrors,
> but I think my mind just exploded when taking into account different
> redhat releases, architectures, and departmental needs.
> 
> Any suggestions out there?  Thanks!

So let me make sure I understand you.

You've got X depts each running multiple versions of linux - are they
all the same distro or multiple distros? Are you going to have
individual department specialized software?

What we did here was find the intersection (for the reasonable part) of
pkgs for the university and put them in a central server let's call it
install.linux.ucalgary.ca.

So lets say you have 4 repositories - for 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0

so you'd have a tree:

/pub/linux/central/
                   7.1
                   7.2
                   7.3
                   8.0

Now those are clearly accessible for anaconda-based installs - the
normal install method
They are also, each yum repositories
so each of those dirs has a headers dir underneath it.

Then you other dirs off of /pub/linux

either:

/pub/linux/sciences/
                    dept1
                    dept2
                    dept3
                    etc
/pub/linux/humanities/
                      depta
                      deptb
                      deptc
                      etc

or:

/pub/linux/
           depta
           dept1
           deptb
           dept2
           etc etc

so each of those is its own repository.

So in order to make this a livable case for you and/or others I should
probably figure out a way to backport the url support to the 1.0 series
of yum. 

then you can have your yum.confs dynamically generated via a script
likes russ' or whatever you'd like.

then a user could do or setup:
 yum -y -c http://install.linux.ucalgary.ca/yum-conf-script.cgi update

and get "the right" configs.

Now. an important issue.

If someone were evil they would crack your central box and root every
system.
Not a trivial task, I'm sure - but not an impossible one.

Does that make any sense?

The way we do it right now is fairly simple - people install yum via the
central site - they have their own local repo on a webserver somewhere.
they add that conf to their systems (and echo command in a %post of a
kickstart) and they are ready to go.


-sv