Yum on several machines

[Leonid Flaks]

Tony Nelson wrote:
> At 6:55 PM +0000 10/28/07, Mike C wrote:
>   
>> Timothy Murphy <tim <at> birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> writes:
>>
>>     
>>> I want to yum-update on several machines,
>>> and I want to avoid repeatedly downloading the same packages.
>>> So what I want when I run "yum update" on machine A
>>> is for it to look for RPMs in a specified directory
>>>       
>> What I do is have a small bash script that rsync's the packages and
>> headers in the /var/cache/yum area from the one machine, where they are
>> downloaded during its own update, to the others.
>>
>> Then I run a normal yum update on the other machines in the LAN after the
>> rsync, and they will get most of the rpm files from the rsync'ed data, but
>> it leaves the machines free to download any extras from the external
>> repos. Not all machines have the same set of rpms necessary unless they
>> are setup in identical fashion.
>>
>> By doing it this way the files in /var/cache/yum use at least an order of
>> magnitude less disk space than if every rpm were stored on the main
>> machine as a fedora repo. As far as I remember the full set is around
>> 10GB, whereas the machines I update generally only need less than 1GB even
>> if they are updating after a first install.
>>     
>
> This sounds like a really workable solution, and more efficient than the cp
> version.
>
> Others suggest squid.  Squid or any other proxy won't work well unless the
> same mirror is used every time.
>
> Yum-presto on all machines can provide further download savings.
>   
Another solution (similar to rsync) is to use nfs-shared cache 
directory. In my case I have /var/cache/yum as a link to this shared 
directory. Then I need only one set of updates. With this configuration 
lock file is also shared, so you probably can't do 'yum update' on more 
then one system at a time.
I am using distributed shell (dsh) for yum updates anyway, so it is not 
an issue.