[Yum] First Yum Repository

[Tess]

Hi Everyone,

I'm setting up my first yum repo on a student network servicing around 
50 Fedora WS and although I have read every howto I can get my hands on, 
I'm learning everyone has an opinion on how it should be done. Could you 
please help me dispel the rumours or point me into the right direction, 
based on what I'm trying to achieve.

1.    I've been told to move everything out of the default 
/var/yum/cache path and place it in /, creating a directory called 
repository. This is because the /var partiton could be overwritten 
during kernel upgrade/re-formatting and in /repository/yum/Fedora/etc it 
will be protected.

2.    I have to exclude all kernel updates from automatically going 
through to the clients because otherwise I will just "break" the ws. Now 
is this what you guys have been recently talking about?..so I just drop 
an exclude line in the yum.conf?

3.    Not to bother with using ftp to connect from clients to server, 
using http instead. Therefore apache is now running on the repo with a 
document root that matches the /repository/path/to/updates

I was planning to use rsync to mirror another repo somewhere, preferably 
in Australia and then set the server to update nightly via cron.daily. I 
also have to go out thru a proxy and have set this in root's .bashrc as< 
set http_proxy="http://172.xx.xx.xx:<port>/"> but is this the best place 
really?

Any suggestions gratefully accepted,

Tess (yes, I'm a bit new to the whole geeky thing but I'm ready to learn 
:-) )