[CentOS] Question on syncing my local repo

Robert Moskowitz

rgm at htt-consult.com
Tue Dec 4 18:29:45 UTC 2007


I have read various howtos on setting up a local mirror of the Centos 
base and update repos.

I think I have them, I have followed the directory tree that I see on 
mirrors.centos.org:

centos/5.1/os/i386/
centos/5.1/updates/i386/


I set up the base tree by copying the ISOs to centos/5.1/os/i386/; 
interestingly centos/5.1/os/i386/isolinux/ has the ISOs, 2-6.  Don't 
know how those got there....

Now my questions:

I used the following rsync to populate centos/5.1/updates/i386/

rsync -av rsync://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/5.1/updates/i386/ \
--exclude=debug/ /repos/centos/5.1/updates/i386

over 300mb was downloaded for the rpms directory.

and then I updated centos/5.1/os/i386/

rsync -avu rsync://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/5.1/os/i386/ \
--exclude=debug/ /repos/centos/5.1/os/i386

Not the inclusion of the -u option.  I first did this with the -n option 
and not the -u option and noticed a lot of rpms to be downloaded for the 
base.  I then added the -u and only one rpm.

So this question is:  when using rsync to mirror the base and update 
repos, should the -u option be used?

Next for the web server.  I tried to use thttpd, thinking I just needed 
a httpd server on this box to dish out the repos.  But thttpd seems to 
refuse to use symlinks (I have the repos on their own partition), so I 
fell back to good old apache (running everything at default with a 
symlink to /repo/centos).

So this question is: what is available in a nice, light, httpd server 
that can handle a symlink?

Finally.

I looked at mrepo, but it seems to be designed to serve the repos from 
the isos.  I did not want to do that and thus rolled my own for now.  So 
is there any value for me to go and use mrepo?

Oh, and will I need createrepo anymore for the base and update repos?

thanks!  Finally a local repo.  The cost of the downloads for upgrading 
to 5.1 supplied the push!





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