question about setting up a local repository

Mark S mjdbhouse at hotmail.com
Fri Feb 27 16:38:08 UTC 2009


Hopefully this is not a faq.
I have a few RH4 servers at my place of work (AS and ES) and I am struggling with how and when to update them.
Our general ROT is to keep Prod and Test servers at the same patch level.  We only have a few servers with more to come so it is not a massive amount of servers I am talking about but I still some process setup.
So normally I would run the up2date command to update my Test server one weekend during our Scheduled Maintenance window and then a month later during our next maintenance window I would apply the same changes to Prod.  However within that period of time new update or fixes may(will) have been released which means my Prod server will now be applying newer (and untested in my environment) fixes.
Secondly the way it is setup now is each server has to download it's updates over the internet which means each server has to go through the same process.
I have a pretty brief KB article talking about 'using up2date locally, disconnected from the network'  where I edit the /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources file and create a directory to store locally copied rpms.
I imagine I could use the up2date -d command to just download specific packages but I don't know if I could download them all that way?
I guess I could download the latest ISO's can run some cmd to unload the packages into a directory which would get me to a specific update level but how do I apply updates to it as they come out and how do I point my other servers to it?
I guess if I did get some configuration working like that then I'd also have to duplicate that for each version like 32-bit ES and 64-bit AS.

So I'd like to know.
1. How do other people manage this?
2. How to setup a local repository properly so my servers can access that instead of going to the web.
3. I imagine there are some tools available for larger organizations.

TIA, MJ

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