[Spacewalk-list] Need for a lightweight mirroring solution

[Michael DeHaan]

Jon Stanley wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 8:05 AM, Michael DeHaan <mdehaan at redhat.com> wrote:
>   
>> Many questions I get on cobbler's mailing list deal with using
>> yum_rhn_plugin to mirror RHEL packages.   These are typically from users who
>> have small-mid size environments that cannot use Satellite for various
>> reasons.
>>     
>
> That;s why we have spacewalk now :)
>
>   
Well, no, the problem is still the same.    The small disconnected labs 
are looking to a solution, and they need to buy Satellite in order to do 
mirroring, even if they only have 10 systems. 

>> The problem with this is that Spacewalk/Satellite's yum_rhn_plugin can only
>> be used to mirror packages that match the arch (and distro) of the
>> requestor.  There is not a good solution for older RHEL or other arches.
>>     
>
> That's really a limitation of yum, I think - not the plugin. Add to
> that the fact that you have to be subscribed to a channel in order to
> mirror it's contents, a system can only be subscribed to one base
> channel, and all of the "interesting" content is generally in the base
> channel. Add all of these together, and you have a fairly lousy
> solution for managing content :(
>
>   
Indeed.
>> Folks who get fed up with this generally turn to mrepo's rhnget, which is a
>> less than elegant solution for several reasons --more so, it does not
>> properly track entitlements, so it's a bit hard to audit what systems are
>> using what.   It's basically a script that uses part of the up2date code.
>>     
>
> I thought that the point of this was to get content into Spacewalk,
> which has it's own "entitlement" tracking mechanism - basically, if
> you're going to use RHEL content outside of hosted/Satellite, then the
> onus of tracking entitlements fails entirely on you. Do it however you
> like :)
>   

Pulp was about pulling the content-management piece from Spacewalk into 
a seperate application, so we can start
thinking in terms of horizontal building blocks (Cobbler, Pulp, Func, 
etc) contributing to vertical applications (Spacewalk).
This is about getting the conversations behind Pulp going again.

>> Now that Spacewalk is out, anyone care to use this list/thread to jumpstart
>> (err, kickstart?) some discussions about getting
>> https://fedorahosted.org/pulp moving again?   I am not so much interested in
>> the whole TurboGears UI idea, primarily I just want to see command line
>> tools and an API to faciliate easier mirroring.  If done as a side-project,
>> it could also be done in such a way as to not require Oracle.
>>     
>
> I was thinking about this, but not really saying anything :).  I
> unfortunately am not much of a developer (I *have* needed to learn
> Python and Java for awhile now.....)
>   
>> Since cobbler already contains constructs for repo mirroring via yum, and we
>> are integrating this into Satellite, perhaps this is something that can be
>> done under cobbler's umbrella to save a bit of infrastructure.    (There is
>> already a completed web app, mirroring code, an XMLPPC interface, and so
>> forth).   Still, I have zero idea how the entitlements connection would
>> work.
>>     
>
> Again, I don't think that entitlement tracking matters. What we really
> need is some authenticated way to expose RHEL content for mirroring
> outside of RHN - and that's gonna be a real sticky point I'm sure.
>   

Doing it without entitlements is quite easy (mrepo) it just makes for 
somewhat weak auditing so that's why
we don't want to endorse it.   The code is also not that pretty :)

--Michael