[Yum] Newbie question

[nosp]

On Fri, 2003-11-14 at 14:46, Jeff Smith wrote:
> [...]
> So when I learned about Yum and started reading, I thought "There is a
> God. And yes, he loves me."
> 
> Then I started reading the How To.

Which howto?

> First step for me should be "get my system up to date". If I understand
> things correctly, I can just run something like "yum update" and yum
> will use its default repos (the ones set up, maintained and supported by
> OTHER people) to get me fixed up.

Yes

> My first question is: Is this kosher? I don't want to wear out my
> welcome on these default sites.

Yes

> My second question is: If I want to put RH9 on all 5 of my computers
> here at home, would it still be kosher to rely on those default sites
> for each, or am I crossing the bounds of good taste?

Yes -- though you will be downloading the same rpms 5 times.  Better to
have all machines share the download directory
(/var/cache/yum/*/packages).  But if you want to kick things off
overnight and don't have time to learn how to get 5 machines sharing a
network drive (it isn't hard, relatively, but...), then there's no
problem.

For me, I have one NFS directory all the machines can mount, and
symlinked /var/cache/yum/*/packages and /var/cache/yum/*/headers to that
directory.  I make sure one machine does a yum check-update and yum
upgrade before all the others, so there is only one writer to that
directory (practically speaking, though there is a danger).

However what you should do in either case is find the closest mirror to
you.  Look at the list of mirrors posted on the Fedora site.