Yum on several machines

[Mike C]

Timothy Murphy <tim <at> birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> writes:

> I want to yum-update on several machines,
> and I want to avoid repeatedly downloading the same packages.
> So what I want when I run "yum update" on machine A
> is for it to look for RPMs in a specified directory

What I do is have a small bash script that rsync's the packages and headers in
the /var/cache/yum area from the one machine, where they are downloaded during
its own update, to the others.

Then I run a normal yum update on the other machines in the LAN after the rsync,
and they will get most of the rpm files from the rsync'ed data, but it leaves
the machines free to download any extras from the external repos.  Not all
machines have the same set of rpms necessary unless they are setup in identical
fashion.  

By doing it this way the files in /var/cache/yum use at least an order of
magnitude less disk space than if every rpm were stored on the main machine as a
fedora repo.  As far as I remember the full set is around 10GB, whereas the
machines I update generally only need less than 1GB even if they are updating
after a first install.

HTH
Mike