William L. Maltby wrote:
To the OP: with 500+ machines(?), would you benefit from having a local repo that you could manage to be sure that all your nodes "sing from the same sheet of music"? The lists have advice on this if you need it.
With Centos 3.x you could easily pull things through a caching proxy by setting http_proxy in the environment from the command like: http_proxy=myproxy.mydomain.com yum update. and any number of machines at a location would only have to download a needed file once (assuming your proxy is configured to cache large files). However, newer releases use a mirrorlist approach that makes each machine pick a different url, defeating the caching. I thought I saw something about 5.x having a way to restore the old way without being tied to a single repository, but I've forgotten it now.