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

[Michael DeHaan]

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