Maciej Zenczykowski spake the following on 4/15/2007 9:46 PM:
I've gone through the trouble (after some 10 rounds I finally have something I'm happy with) and generated jigdo/template files for CentOS 5.0 iso's (CD/DVD i386/x86_64) (and CentOS 4.4 while I was at it: CD/DVD/ServerCD SRPMS/i386/x86_64).
(and I started on this before the thread about creating the DVD's from the CD's started ;-) )
They are available at: http://tcs.uj.edu.pl/~buildcentos/centos-jigdo/
(I skipped the LiveCD since jigdo offers no size improvement here -- already for the ServerCD the template file is 125 MBs because of the different .img files inside the iso)
These jigdo/template files should allow you to generate any of the listed cd/dvd isos from the publically available http://mirror.centos.org mirror site (which is DNS-aliased to something close to you). Jigdo will also allow using a local source of files (ie. an existing CD, etc...)
You will need to install jigdo-file and jigdo-lite.
It is available:
- in package jigdo from dag's repository (rpmforge) for CentOS 4 (and
others)
- in package jigdo-file for debian/ubuntu (just apt-get it)
- from the source website (both sources, and windows binaries, and
statically linked linux binaries) http://atterer.net/jigdo/
Once installed usage is (...should be...) trivial:
jigdo-lite --noask http://tcs.uj.edu.pl/~buildcentos/centos-jigdo/%.jigdo
which will generate the requested (replace the % with what you want, see the http://tcs.uj.edu.pl/~buildcentos/centos-jigdo/ listing) iso file in the directory in which you run it.
[If you have a local source of files you can skip the --noask and provide it when asked]
Next step: get this included on the centos mirrors ;-) [hint hint]
Afterwards: it would be nice to drop the iso files from the mirrors in their entirety and generate them on-the-fly using the JTE extensions package. Should be significant space-savings. [requires perl cgi in the hosting webserver, but should be very safe since it's all read-only access]
Even later: it would be awesome if we could generate the jigdo/template during mkisofs (requires using a patched mkisofs). This would skip the slightly painful jigdo generation step (painful - because I have to download a local mirror of both the files and the CD/DVD images, much less painful to do it directly on the centos source/build system/mirrors)
Both later steps are 95% there (the JTE jigit website/extensions/mkisofs patches/etc) and mostly require putting together rpms for EL4/5. (I'm going to be trying to put together a mkisofs-jte rpm which doesn't override the normal mkisofs rpm, but instead provides two files - /usr/bin/mkisofs-jte and it's manpage)
This should also allow more customized images (like the rolled up updates) without increasing mirror space usage.
Jigdo (combined with hardlinking identical files, which I believe is already done) should enable drastic reductions in centos HDD footprint.
Comments?
Bitorrent has one advantage over jigdo AFAIR -- Jigdo uses the bandwidth of the mirrors to get all downloads, but bittorrent uses the bandwidth of the downloaders. This adds up to significant savings to the one hosting the files, because storage is an occasional purchase, where bandwidth is a monthly expense.