Robinson Tiemuqinke spake the following on 6/6/2007 5:37 PM:
Hi,
I've just turned from Fedora Core to Centos 5, And would like to know the 'official' way/mechanism to upgrade a bunch of Centos 5 machines.
My basic situation is: hundred of machines will be installed with Centos 5.0 by means of kickstart. and then the machines will always uses Centos 5.0 kickstart images for initial installation, not Centos 5.1, Centos 5.2, etc.
Since you will be installing hundreds of machines, a local copy of the repo is beneficial. Since you want to stay with the 5.0 install disks, the update list will just grow over time as you install new machines in the future.
So my questions are:
1, If the above possible? Since I take lot effort to have hacked Centos 5.0 images to make it work for my mixed environment, and I don't like to do the same work every three months.
If you are installing by kickstart, you only need the boot images, and you point to your own install directories. You could use FTP HTTP or even NFS. That way, you will not have the large amount of updates to every future install after they are built.
2, Based on Centos 5.0 initial installation, can I upgrade the Centos 5.0 machines to Centos 5.1 level, 5.2 level, and so on, by means of continuous online upgrade but not reinstallation, right?
You can just have a yum -y upgrade in %post-install of your kickstart, or hack it into the firstboot scripts. You will want to also add your repo mods into the kickstart also.
3, For continuous online upgrade, which repositories should I download and keep updated daily? If the extras/ and updates/ are enough? Or I have to download addons/ centosplus/ fasttrack/ as well, or even isoes/
You only would want to mirror the extra repos above if you use them. If you don't install anything from centosplus or addons, you don't need to mirror it. And fasttrack stuff might not actually make it into the next release.
and os/?
4, I've changed file /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo to use only os/ and updates/ repositories. and when it is needed, I manually pull packages from other Centos 5 repositories. Is this the 'official' way? or not? I mean, should I better include repositories like 'centosplus/'?
As above. If you are not going to install from centosplus, then don't bother mirroring it. And if you really want something from centosplus on a box or two, you can either put them back to standard updates, or add an outside link to the centosplus directory. You would want to use the protect-base add on for anything in plus anyway .
Thanks a lot, sorry for too many questions as I am a newbie to Centos.
For a newbie, you seem to be jumping in with both feet! Welcome to CentOS! I don't have enough machines yet to set all this up yet, but here's to the future!