On Wed, 15 Sep 2010, website reader wrote:
> A person writes "A lot depends on the distribution(s) you're hoping
> to mirror. Without knowing that, any response I give would be
> tentative."
>
> I am neutral at the moment to a specific vendor, although I have
> used Open Caldera, Red Hat (Fedora and RHn series) Open Suse and
> Ubuntu.
>
> Does this help?
No, not really. I'm somewhat familiar with mirroring CentOS and
Debian, which have fairly different requirements.
CentOS is mirrored mostly by version. That is, the primary choice you
face is which version(s) you want to mirror (4? 5?). CentOS, like RHEL
on which it's based, is a fairly compact distribution. Any given point
release (e.g., 5.5) can be mirrored for installation and update
purposes with about 20 GB of disk space. Bandwidth requirements are
fairly minimal -- except when a new point release hits the mirrors.
Here's a compact version of my rsync script, which doesn't mirror the
large ISO (CD, DVD) files or the smaller centosplus or extras
repositories:
----- %< -----
VERS="5.5"
/usr/bin/rsync -avSH \
--exclude "isos" --exclude "centosplus" --exclude "extras" \
mirrors.cat.pdx.edu::centos/${VERS}/
/srv/mirrors/centos/${VERS}/
----- %< -----
The primary choice with Debian, OTOH, is which platforms (i386, amd64,
source, ...) you want to support. I use the ftpsync utility (which
uses rsync under the hood) for Debian mirroring. You don't really It's
hard to exclude a specific version, so you end up mirroring stable,
testing, and experimental all at once. Our mirror for the i386 and
amd64 platforms a little over 100 GB of disk space and the nightly
bandwidth requirements are much larger than for CentOS.
Both Debian and CentOS I make available to local machines via HTTP
(using lighttpd). Installations (using PXE) and updates (yum, apt) are
quick. I can kickstart a CentOS 5 virtual machine in five to seven
minutes, depending on the complexity of the installation. Debian takes
a bit longer because it lacks a kickstart facility, but it's still a
relatively quick process.
--
Paul Heinlein <> [email protected] <> http://www.madboa.com/
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