Hi,
I've been using Debian for a few years, and there was one nifty little app that made installing and updating so much easier: apt-proxy.
Most of the time, I'm taking care of small LANs with an average of five client PCs. But this is a very remote place in South France, so most villages only have 512 kbps DSL. One major update for openoffice.org-*, and I have to wait the whole day for updating each machine (unless I scp -r /var/cache/yum from machine to machine, but that's another story).
I'm currently testing an "intermediate" solution: creating a local Yum repository. I have [base], which consists of all the 5.1 RPMS copied over from the DVD. Then [updates], which I'm currently rsyncing from a remote mirror. And I think I'll do something similar with [extra], which only leaves [rpmforge] (but I won't cache that :oD). Not a very satisfying solution, since for example I'm currently installing XFCE as only desktop environment, and I have nevertheless to download every GNOME- and KDE-related update.
A message to the developers: yum-proxy would be a much-needed addition to Yum, in my humble opinion. I don't have the technical skills to develop such a thing, but maybe one of you has (Daniel, do you read this? :oD)
I'm curious about your comments on this.
Cheers,
Niki