[Yum] Re: Survey of Use

[Hedemark, Magnus]

RPJD said:
> but (and i'm guessing here) i would think that the majority 
> of folks who
> are introduced to yum for the first time are going to want to know,
> quickly and concisely, how to run it as a *client*.  (from 
> what i've seen
> in the survey results, the majority of people on this list can be
> considered fairly "elite" in that many of them have set up their own
> repositories.  but that doesn't fairly represent the beginners.)

I sent my survey privately to Seth (before I saw the flood of public
responses) so I'll rehash a little bit of what we're doing at TruePosition.

We're a very rapidly growing company with a very small MIS department.  The
use of Linux has been exploding here.  Since we're entirely self supporting,
and RH's up2date model doesn't allow for a reasonably priced site proxy for
up2date and RHN, I started looking at alternatives.  Also, even with close
to 1,000 users at peak times, we get by with a very small pipe to the
Internet.  Having hundreds of machines running up2date against RH's servers
would be unacceptable.  Some of the TriLUG folks were speaking highly of
yum, so I gave it a look.  While we all know that the documentation is
having a hard time catching up with the brisk pace of development, I was
able to piece together what I was after with the help of Google and the
online list archives.

Now I have an apache server in-house that is carrying three Yum repositories
(mirrors of base & updates from ftp.redhat.com plus custom packages for TP).
As we assimilate systems one by one into the MIS collective, we're having
them hit the in house yum repository once a day for updates.

I'm also using Yum during the RH install process, via a Kickstart
post-install script.  This way a system goes out of my office already
patched and already loaded with our custom RPM's.  Between Kickstart & Yum
it takes me from 5-10 minutes of actual work to set up a new Linux machine.
I'm anticipating cutting that figure in half when I'm done setting up my yum
groups, and will cut it down in half again when I have a PHP script
generating my kickstart config file to set up the host-specific bits.

That said, my interest from the beginning was in hosting a local repository,
and using the repository to automate a lot of my daily work.  I'm very happy
with what has been accomplished so far, and once I settle on a group
configuration and get some more of our custom bits packaged in RPM's I
anticipate I'll have a lot more (needed) time to maintain the less automated
Windows environment.

What order should it be addressed in when it's doc'd?  Frankly I don't care,
as long as it gets doc'd.  :-)

--Magnus