[Spacewalk-list] metadata_expire and Spacewalk updates

[Brian Long]

Dennis, thanks for your response, but I'm not concerned with the
Spacewalk side of the metadata.  I'm interesting in getting my clients
updating their metadata as soon as a Spacewalk channel is updated.
With default configuration, it could take six hours before they see
the channel has been updated since yum's default metadata_expire
setting is six hours.  I'm wondering if other users of Spacewalk are
somehow forcing client-side metadata updates before telling Spacewalk
to update their clients?  Or are people configuring each of their
client yum.conf files to specify a smaller metadata_expire setting to
fix this behavior?

When yum-based Linux installs are Internet-connected and trying to
download updates from upstream mirrors like Fedora, CentOS, etc. I
understand metadata_expire being set to six hours out-of-the-box.  The
problem is operationalizing Spacewalk, I cannot push updates to a
channel and then immediately tell a client to update itself and
reboot.  Depending on where it is in that metadata_expire window, it
won't see the newest changes.   Another way to say this is that I have
to update my channels and wait six hours before telling Spacewalk to
push the updates out; otherwise a lot of my clients will not get the
latest updates.  rhn_check checks in, sees no updates and the task is
done.  Does that make more sense?

/Brian/