[rhelv6-beta-list] My first experiences with RHEL6 beta

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 2:03 PM, Jon Masters <jcm at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-06-10 at 17:19 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:

>> Speaking of vi, why is the whole of vim not installed? Why, when I
>> wanted to install more software, yum goes out to the network and
>> downloads stuff at 30kbytes/sec (my network can do 1.5 mbytes/sec and
>> better, the the speed problem's not at my end) when it could load of my
>> virtual DVD at 200 Mbytes/sec?
>
> There might be more recent package versions available online, and so it
> is a good idea to look for them. Of course, if you have local media then
> that can be used too. I typically configure a local repository for my
> beta systems based upon the ISO image so that I can be flexible about
> using those or the latest package versions, etc.

This takes a bit of work. If you don't have a subscription to RHN
configured, or the resources to set up an RHN  Satellite for your
environment, it's also possible to maintain a local mirror of RHN's
updates with "reposync", and point your yum clients to that, and to
snapshot it to provide local point releases. This can scale better
than the sometimes confusing and slow interfaces to the RHN system,
which were especially an issue 2 years ago when I was working in
England. (I assume that RedHat has improved European RHN performance
since then.)

If you do this, you will definitely want to either delete
"yum-rhn-plugin" or disable it on all hosts but the mirror server,
because the constant whinging by yum-rhn-plugin for all operations not
done by root is seriously irritating. And if you're reliant on a local
snapshot for updates, you do *not* want your hosts reaching out to RHN
for updates without specific authorization. I prefer to rip
yum-rhn-plugin out, but it has a nasty dependency web with rhnsd and
rhn-check.  (rhn-check should be a stand alone: it does *NOT* need
rhnsd or yum-rhn-plugin, but the RPM dependencies are nasty.)

I also find it very useful to have a cron job run nightly to dump the
"yum list" information into /var/log/yumlist, for reference and ease
of checking for software packages without reaching out to the network
all the time.