Make your own yum repository
2006-03-09 17:18:21
If you are a Linux Fedora Core user, you might be familiar with the package management tool "yum." Yum is nice, and similar to pacman (on arch) and apt (on debian/ubuntu). It's a little bit annoying the way it has a huge (25-second) startup while it reads in and parse meta-data. But otherwise it works well.
If you have a lot of machines to keep up to date, however, it is inefficient to have all of them phone home to the mirror sites out on the net to update packages. At least it is when you are on a wimpy T1. I found this document on creating your own local yum repository. It is very succinct. I also found this one, which is way more wordy than necessary, but it gives more background, and includes info on seeding the base yum repository from the FC4 distro CDs.
The bad part of it is that you have to pay the one-time bandwidth pain of getting the entire FC4 updates repo mirrored to your own server. It's pretty huge, at least 2GB.
For my own reference, this is what I am doing:
rsync -av --exclude debug --exclude=repodata/
'--exclude=debuginfo' '--exclude=i18'
'--exclude=langpack'
'rsync://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/updates/4/i386/*'
/var/ftp/pub/yum/4/i386/updates/
createrepo -q /var/ftp/pub/yum/4/i386/updates/
repoview -q /var/www/html/yum/4/i386/updates/