On Mon, 23 Mar 2009, Michael DeHaan wrote: > The content /must/ be surfaced externally somehow even if you are > not mirroring it, for installed machines to be able to access that > content.
Yes, as I tried to explain in a previous e-mail, it's all done through NFS. For the moment, so without using cobbler, the installed machine acts as a NFS client by having in /etc/fstab something like: mirrorserver:/mirrordir /mnt/upd nfs hard,intr,ro 0 0 (can also be done with "noauto" or via autofs to avoid the mount being permanent) and in /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo something like: [base] name=CentOS-$releasever - Base baseurl=file:///mnt/upd/centos/$releasever/os/$basearch/ Installing/updating on hundreds of machines, like I do, needs to be as efficient as possible - when using NFS to share the repos, yum doesn't need to download the RPMs before installing them, it only checks them, which is much faster and requires a lot less network traffic. Furthermore, instead of reading the freshly downloaded RPM from a local disk (/var/cache/yum) and writing it back to possibly the same disk (if /var is not on a separate partition), it reads the RPM directly from the network; when doing simultaneous installs/updates on many clients, the RPMs are most likely cached in RAM on the NFS server, so the whole process becomes limited by the network bandwidth and the speed of rpm writing files to the local disk. The answers to my messages as well as browsing through the cobbler list archives makes me wonder whether you are aware that yum is able to work this way. -- Bogdan Costescu IWR, University of Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany Phone: +49 6221 54 8240, Fax: +49 6221 54 8850 E-mail: [email protected] _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list [email protected] https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
