doughnuts on a fish hook

[Magnus]

On Tuesday, August 26, 2003, at 07:17  PM, Jay Turner wrote:

> Actually, following up on my own post, I need to clarify something.  
> The
> license for RHEL 2.1 states that if you have support (which includes 
> RHN)
> for one install, then you will have it for all installations.  So, in 
> that
> case, if you are in compliance, then all of your installations would 
> have
> RHN support and there would be no need to download the errata from RHN 
> then
> push it out to other machines.  Sorry for the confusion.

Well, there *is* a need actually.

Let's say Joe has 50 RHEL servers, all pretty much identical, and 
properly licensed.  There is a flurry of security activity one week and 
it takes about 50MB of new packages to patch one system.  That's not 
much of a reach.  Each of the 50 servers downloads 50MB of packages 
through https (i.e. not cached anywhere) over Joe's single business 
class DSL connection.  2500MB of downloads, split up across 50 clients, 
all hitting a DSL connection at once (not to mention the RHN servers).  
This is lunacy.

Most other distros permit larger installations to have their own local 
package repositories, and this is what would make the most sense.  I 
understand that Red Hat has a product that will do this, but the cost 
is far above the means of someone like Joe.

The centralization of RHN is part of the driving force, IMHO, behind 
projects like Current and Yum.  It would be far grander, I think, to 
have the slick RHN interface on the front end and the local repository 
on the back end.

So getting back to your example, yes, there is a need for RHEL 
customers to download one copy of a package and push it out to other 
machines.

--

C. Magnus Hedemark
http://trilug.org/~chrish
"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink 
what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." - Mark Twain
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