Stephen,
     Thank you very much for your help.  It works pretty good :-) but has a few glitches.  I read the rsync man pages and according to it the exclusion list contains files and folder name patterns to be excluded.  The exclusion works but it still creates symlinks :-(
$ du -s -h *
0       2
0       3
0       3.1
0       3.3
0       3.4
0       3.5
0       4
439M    4.2
0       RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-2
4.0K    RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4
0       RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4
4.0K    TIME
4.0K    timestamp.txt

Is there a way to stop it from creating these symlinks that dont' point to anything. Here is my exclusion list:
/2.1/
/2/
/3.1/
/3.3/
/3.4/
/3.5/
/3.6/
/3/
/4/
/4.0/
/4.1/
/4.3beta/
/HEADER.images/
/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-2/
/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4/
/build/
/graphics/
/HEADER.html/
/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-3/
/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4/

#4.2 excludes
/4.2/Readme.txt
/4.2/addons/
/4.2/apt/
/4.2/centosplus/
/4.2/contrib/
/4.2/csgfs/
/4.2/docs/
/4.2/extras/
/4.2/isos/
/4.2/os/
/4.2/testing/
#Only get i386, ia64, x86_64
/4.2/updates/SRPMS/
/4.2/updates/alpha/
/4.2/updates/ppc/
/4.2/updates/s390/
/4.2/updates/s390x/

Thanks,
Vijay Avarachen

On 1/5/06, Stephen Weyland <stephen.weyland@mercuryblue.com.au> wrote:
Vijay Avarachen wrote:
Hello,
      My environment is using CentOS 4.2 on all workstations and I would like to setup a local mirror just for the updates.  I only x86, x86_64 and ia64 architectures.  How can I setup a rsync mirror of the updates folder for only these architectures?  I am very new to rsync, so please apologize if this is a very ignorant question.

I just finished figuring this out and documenting, so here you go. You can probably fine tune it as this is my first attempt.

### How to use rsync to create a local mirror of the insallation files for CentOS, of course this could be used for anything else with modifications.
### We are going to create 2 files and edit a 3rd
### 1- Create  a directory to store some files in.
### 2- A script to run rsync --- "update.sh"
### 3- An exclusion list so we don't download a bunch of stuff we don't want --- "rsync-exclude.list"
### 4- We need to schedule the update to run by modifying --- /etc/crontab, (crontab -e would be better)

1- Create a directory to store the files "update.sh" and "rsync-exclude.list"
mkdir /opt/mirror

2- Create "update.sh" script to run rsync
# See a list of mirrors at http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=13
# --delete means delete files locally that no longer exist on the mirror
vi /opt/mirror/update.sh
rsync -aqzH --exclude-from=/opt/mirror/rsync-exclude.list --delete rsync.planetmirror.com::centos /var/ftp/pub/centos/
# make it executable
chmod 700 /opt/mirror/update.sh

3- Create an exclude list
vi /opt/mirror/rsync-exclude.list
# add a list of the files you want to be excluded in the rsync process
# files with a slash at the beginning are referenced to the root of the rsync directory you connected to.
# in this case rsync.planetmirror.com/centos (the ::centos above is the /centos here)
# files with a trailing slash indicate any directory with that name anywhere. e.g "apt/" will skip any directory in any sub-tree named apt

/2.1/
/2/
/3.1/
/3.3/
/3.4/
/3.5/
/3.6/
/3/
# The following need to be excluded from /4/
apt/
docs/
isos/
# The following need to be excluded from all directories they are present in, like /4/os/ and /4/updates/  ...  We only want the i386 directory.
SRPMS/
alpha/
ia64/
ppc/
s390/
s390x/
x86_64/



4- Add a line to /etc/crontab to run the job once a day or once a week or whenever, the following shows run on the 1st minute, 1st hour, Sunday

1  1  * * sun root /opt/mirror/update.sh

Thank you,
Vijay Avarachen

--
"Knowledge is the only wealth that grows as you spend it, and diminishes as you save it."
-- ancient Sanskrit saying

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Stephen Weyland

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--
"Knowledge is the only wealth that grows as you spend it, and diminishes as you save it."
-- ancient Sanskrit saying