[Spacewalk-list] Need for a lightweight mirroring solution

[Jon Stanley]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 8:05 AM, Michael DeHaan <mdehaan at redhat.com> wrote:
> Many questions I get on cobbler's mailing list deal with using
> yum_rhn_plugin to mirror RHEL packages.   These are typically from users who
> have small-mid size environments that cannot use Satellite for various
> reasons.

That;s why we have spacewalk now :)

> The problem with this is that Spacewalk/Satellite's yum_rhn_plugin can only
> be used to mirror packages that match the arch (and distro) of the
> requestor.  There is not a good solution for older RHEL or other arches.

That's really a limitation of yum, I think - not the plugin. Add to
that the fact that you have to be subscribed to a channel in order to
mirror it's contents, a system can only be subscribed to one base
channel, and all of the "interesting" content is generally in the base
channel. Add all of these together, and you have a fairly lousy
solution for managing content :(

> Folks who get fed up with this generally turn to mrepo's rhnget, which is a
> less than elegant solution for several reasons --more so, it does not
> properly track entitlements, so it's a bit hard to audit what systems are
> using what.   It's basically a script that uses part of the up2date code.

I thought that the point of this was to get content into Spacewalk,
which has it's own "entitlement" tracking mechanism - basically, if
you're going to use RHEL content outside of hosted/Satellite, then the
onus of tracking entitlements fails entirely on you. Do it however you
like :)
>
> Now that Spacewalk is out, anyone care to use this list/thread to jumpstart
> (err, kickstart?) some discussions about getting
> https://fedorahosted.org/pulp moving again?   I am not so much interested in
> the whole TurboGears UI idea, primarily I just want to see command line
> tools and an API to faciliate easier mirroring.  If done as a side-project,
> it could also be done in such a way as to not require Oracle.

I was thinking about this, but not really saying anything :).  I
unfortunately am not much of a developer (I *have* needed to learn
Python and Java for awhile now.....)
>
> Since cobbler already contains constructs for repo mirroring via yum, and we
> are integrating this into Satellite, perhaps this is something that can be
> done under cobbler's umbrella to save a bit of infrastructure.    (There is
> already a completed web app, mirroring code, an XMLPPC interface, and so
> forth).   Still, I have zero idea how the entitlements connection would
> work.

Again, I don't think that entitlement tracking matters. What we really
need is some authenticated way to expose RHEL content for mirroring
outside of RHN - and that's gonna be a real sticky point I'm sure.