Sharing yum between several machines

[Tim]

On Sat, 2009-02-28 at 12:25 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Basically, I would like a system where yum looks first
> in a /common/yum/ directory NFS-mounted on several machines,
> and if it does not find what it is looking for
> then it goes to a mirror as before,
> and adds what it finds to /common/yum/ as well as installing it
> on the machine in question.

If you have one computer which uses yum as normal, then NFS shares out
the /var/cache/yum/*/packages to the other computers.  Then the other
computers would mount into their /var/cache/yum*/packages directories,
when you use yum on them, they'd use whatever packages are found in
there (not caring whether it was local or over NFS), and store anything
that they download into the common directories on your server.

I suggest only sharing the packages sub-directories, not the
whole /var/cache/yum tree.  This allows local computers to keep their
own metadata, etc.  And updating one wouldn't stomp on the data needed
by another box.

I wouldn't do a yum update simultaneously on two or more boxes, though.
I don't know how it'd take to two boxes both trying to download the same
RPM file to the same place.

I've done something along these lines in the past.

-- 
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