Sharing yum between several machines

[Bill Davidsen]

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.
> 
> Does yum have such a facility?
> I googled for "yum several machines" but all the solutions suggested,
> eg setting up a local mirror, seemed to me excessive for my purposes.
> 
> 
That's the way I do it here. I have a pair of scripts which handle it. The first 
mounts the master copy as /mnt/cache and creates symbolic links in 
/var/cache/yum to the rpm files. Then the upgrade is run, and the "backup" 
script first lists which files have changed, and then uses rsync to backup the 
changes. I found this was more reliable than NFS mounting, due to possible 
conflicts and also laptops being updated over less than perfect connections.

Note that doing this way does not delete old copies of the packages, which may 
or may not be desirable. I have a script which finds the deleted packages and 
backs them up by moving them, that way I have older stuff should I need it for 
some reason.

If you have solid networking and don't need the old packages you can just NFS 
mount /var/cache/yum (don't run multiple upgrades at the same time).

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot