[Spacewalk-list] some questions about OSAD and cleaning up spacewalk

[Michiel van Es]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Spacewalk-list] some questions about OSAD and cleaning up 
spacewalk
From: David Nutter <davidn at bioss.sari.ac.uk>
To: spacewalk-list at redhat.com <spacewalk-list at redhat.com>
Date: 11/09/2009 03:34 PM

> On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 02:52:03PM +0100, Michiel van Es wrote:
> 

Hi David

> *snip*
>  
>> - Our spacewalk diskspace is growing and growing (new updates arriving 
>> every day through our reposync script).
>> Many packages are being kept with older versions, for example the kernel.
>> Is there a clean up script to clean up , let's say, package versions 
>> older then 2 or 3 versions?
>> Or how does anyone clean up their spacewalk packages?
> 
> We rely on being quite strict about our channel lifespans. We maintain
> all channels as local yum repositories as well. In the case of
> upstream (CentOS, EPEL etc) we rely on upstream to keep them clean for
> us. We clean our own repositories manually. Each repository maps onto
> one channel in Spacewalk.
> 
> Over the lifetime of a CentOS major release, the size of the channels
> for that release will tend towards infinity. When a new release is
> made we create a new set of channels for that release and repush all
> content from the yum repositories. This is nowhere near as painful as
> it sounds since most packages don't in fact change between releases
> and pushing a package that already exists is super-quick. Then we
> migrate systems to the new channel set and finally delete the old
> channels, which does away with the accumulated cruft when you delete
> the thousands of "Packages in No Channels" via "Manage Packages". 
> 
> The above approach works for us but we don't have multiple
> distros/architectures and are not particularly disk-constrained as a
> result. Instead, you may be able to write an API script that navigates
> the package version tree to find and remove old versions.

I think the above approach is something my company should consider..
I think we have to wait for CentOS 5.5/6 when it is there and then try 
your suggested channel solution.

> 
> Regards,
Regards,

Michiel
>