[rhn-users] Network Installations via RHN Proxy Servers

[Dag Wieers]

On Sat, 10 Feb 2007, inode0 wrote:

> While I know there is no official support for this, everyone must do
> it or arrange network installs from somewhere else. We maintain
> network install trees for RHEL3, RHEL4, FC5, and FC6 currently and I
> am getting tired of doing an installation and then needing to apply
> hundreds of updates immediately after a fresh install.
> 
> It doesn't seem to me that it would be that difficult to update the
> installation trees as packages are updated so a fresh install will be
> current right after it finishes. I am quite capable of not
> understanding why some things are problematic though. At least that
> would be a lot nicer for users who do interactive installs.
> 
> Can someone tell me what would need to be changed in these trees? I'm
> thinking some repodata mods would be required for the fedora side and
> perhaps something in the base directory on the RHEL side. And then
> there is the question of how to get the updated packages from RHN to
> put into the trees. mrepo is the only tool I'm vaguely aware of that
> allows grabbing such updates in a single location. It would be nice
> though if Red Hat just accommodated the need for this directly.

We've discussed doing this on the mailinglist (and I have had some 
conversations with people that have this on their wishlist).

One of the problems is the differences between distributions, another is 
the fact that mrepo starts from ISO images (and as a result are read-only 
mounted) to save disk space.

What I am interested to look at is using fuse/unionfs to make the 
ISO-images modifiable and as a result rewrite the on-disc metadata to 
accomodate kickstart installations.

For this mrepo needs an understanding of anaconda's metadata and apply the 
correct methodology, unionfs integration and the metadata re-generation 
functionality.

Usually mrepo development is driven by effort from users. The best way to 
get new features in mrepo is looking into specifics, join discussions and 
providing patches/information.

PS Starting with RHEL5 this is really no longer necessary as RHEL5 allows 
to use normal yum repositories. The fact that Yum is now moving to an 
sqlite metadata format will probably mean that for FC7/RHEL6 will again 
have a different methodology :)

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]