Newbie Warnng! : Fedora Core Offline Updates

[stan]

Robert Bernabe wrote:
> Hi all,
>   Many thanks in advance.  We are investigating Fedora Core right now 
> and one of the concerns is that the FC system will not be connected (or 
> allowed to connect to the internet). All updates will have to be done 
> offline. Is there a central place to check for updates to download for 
> offline installation? Is there a compiled tar file for this anywhere?  
> We are trying to google right now and just thought to ask...if the 
> answer here is RTFM then I'm sorry.
> 
I haven't used rsync and perhaps it does this 
automatically, but you can also use wget with a list of 
packages that you have installed, set to only update 
files that have changed.  Point it to a specific mirror 
that you know is fast and run it every night.  You 
could then burn the resulting changes to a DVD and use 
sneaker net to put it into the yum cache on the machine 
you are running in isolated mode.  Then you would just 
run yum update as normal and the updates would occur.

I don't think that the Fedora inrastructure is really 
set up for this sort of no internet updating.  The 
changes are pushed out to the mirrors over the 
internet, and the individual installations look over 
the internet to pull the updates they want.

So no matter what workaround you use, it is going to 
require internet access for some machine.

You could just set up two identical machines, one on 
the internet, one off.  Set up yum to cache the 
packages on the machine connected to the internet.  Use 
the cache to burn a DVD.  The packages are all signed 
with a redhat key that would be verified on the offline 
machine, so you could be sure of getting unadulterated 
packages.  The online machine would just be a dummy for 
getting the packages.  Turn off all services and set up 
the firewall to be very restrictive.  No local data, 
just the bare installation with all the packages of the 
offline machine.  To be even more paranoid, only boot 
and check for updates, then shut it down, so you are 
only on the net for the duration of the package 
downloads and update.