On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Tue, 2005-09-06 at 10:58 +1000, John Newbigin wrote:
Yum headers are also not very robust. You can't safely use yum while a) updating your mirror or b) running yum-arch (with -c which takes along time, esp on openoffice). This is a PITA when you are patching a lot of machines and want to obtain new software at the same time.
It is the safest thing to do to create your own yum headers with yum- arch ... but we do not so that for the 14 mirrors that get mirrored from the master mirror. For at least CentOS-3 and 4, these work fine without running yum-arch (or createrepo) on any mirror except the master mirror and rsync'ing it to the rest.
Jeff Pitman added something to rsync I requested and it was accepted in rsync 0.6.3. It allows to do near-atomic updates when mirroring. What it does is during rsyncing all updates are made to a ghost-directory and at the end of the updates all changes are applied together.
This narrows the window of opportunity where people might be using yum/apt/smart when the metadata had been replaced but not all the files were in place or vice versa.
Before this change I had to be careful to sync my main mirror in between intervals when the public mirror was scheduled to sync (to avoid the same kind of conflict). With this functionality I have much more flexibility as the metadata and data are being updated almost atomically (instead of sometimes 2 to 3 hours delay between my first file and my last file due to slow upstream bandwidth).
The functionallity is called --delay-updates and both server and client need support for this to make it work.
Kind regards, -- dag wieers, dag@wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]