[et-mgmt-tools] Thoughts on repo mirroring...

[Michael DeHaan]

Added some preliminary support for making local mirrors of yum 
repositories (rsync mirrors only thus far).   Nothing incredibly 
magical, but it could prove useful to some as it evolves.
It's checked in, but not documented (except here).

Example:

# cobbler repo add --name=fc6i386updates 
--mirror=rsync://distro.ibiblio.org/fedora-linux-core/updates/6/i386
# cobbler reposync 
# cobbler profile add --name=blah --distro=blah --kickstart=/tmp/foo.ks 
--repos="fc6i386updates"

The "reposync" command would rsync any repo's cobbler knew about, and is 
called independently from sync.   It's suitable for usage on cron, 
though cobbler doesn't install a crontab yet.   Later, it will probably 
be expanded
to support more types of mirroring than just rsync (i.e. reposync or 
using the yum API). 

Now, the first two commands just provide basic mirroring.   The last 
command includes the "--repos" bit, which is only useful on FC6 and 
later (not sure about RHEL5?).   If the foo.ks assigned to the profile 
contains the template line "TEMPLATE::yum_repo_stanza", that spot in the 
template would be replaced with the code to let Anaconda install from 
any repos assigned to that profile.   The value of the replaced 
"TEMPLATE::yum_repo_stanza" entry would be ...   

    repo --name=fc6updates 
--baseurl=http://172.16.57.21/repo_mirror/fc6updatesi386

The "/etc/cobbler/kickstart_fc6.ks" that ships with cobbler (from now 
on) has that TEMPLATE::yum_repo_stanza line in there to be used if any 
repos are configured.
You can also specify more than one repo, i.e. "cobbler profile add ... 
--repos="fc6i386updates fc6i386extras mycompanyrepo" and so forth.  .  

This is just a start, but it's a logical progression of mirroring, since 
the point of having a local boot server is partially to have speedy OS 
installs -- that should apply to upgrades too.

Note that this doesn't configure yum.repos.d on the installed machine -- 
you'll still have to do that on your own (for now).    Cobbler really 
shouldn't force puppet or cfengine at anyone who doesn't want it (yet) 
and those that
are already using one can use those tools to push out the mirror 
configurations.

Michael DeHaan wrote:

>
> A few thoughts on mirroring...
>
> "Cobbler import" provides a way of keeping the network demands of 
> running a large install farm under control -- that is, kickstart tree 
> content doesn't have to come from public mirrors.   This means faster 
> installs, less bandwidth, and in general being nice to community 
> provided mirrors.   One thing that cobbler hasn't been doing is to 
> integrate this with a good repository mirroring strategy.    Installs 
> from public and private data ought to come in through the boot server, 
> not the local university every time.
>
> I'm looking fairly closely at reposync and plain rsync right now... 
> rsync would have some disadvantage in that it would generally bring 
> down too much content, for instance, say you weren't interested in 
> KDE.   Comments?   Thoughts?   What tools are folks already using to 
> do this?
>
> Tenatively, I see this looking something like
>
> cobbler repo add --name=foo --mirror=URL
> and putting something like
> "cobbler repo sync" on a crontab.
>
> Then, each cobbler profile would have a new optional property 
> ("--repos") that would give information about what repositories to use 
> by default.
>
> cobbler profile add --name=p1 --distro=d1 --repos="fc6updates 
> fc6extras myspecialfc6repo"
>
> If a distribution being detected in an import is greater than "FC6", 
> we know that we can add repo's directly in the kickstart based on the 
> "repo" directive, otherwise, we'll have to tweak the kickstarts 
> slightly differently.     All of the repo assignment could be 
> automagically filled in during kickstart templating (which is done at 
> "cobbler sync" time).
>
> --Michael
>
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