[CentOS] yum difference

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 7:30 PM, derleader mail <derleader at abv.bg> wrote:
>>On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 7:20 PM, derleader mail wrote:
>>>>> Red hat yum downloads packages from RHN
>>>>> Centos yum downloads packages from the fastest mirror?
>>>>>
>>>>> There is difference in configuration.
>>>>
>>>>Redhat uses yum rhnplugin to download packages from rhnet.
>>>>
>>>>It's only difference. rhnplugin is closed source system that ties into
>>>>rhn.redhat.com
>>>
>>>
>>> http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/SRPMS/yum-rhn-plugin-0.9.1-5.el6.src.rpm
>>>
>>> Is this the package?
>>
>>Yes, and it has a stack of dependencies to manage RHEL authentication.
>>Frankly, I always disable it except on a host that is downloading a
>>local RHEL mirror with "reposync", and which is my local yum
>>repository. That makes the components available to non-root users for
>>review and downloading, one of the great flaws of that plugin.
>
>
> Do you know where I can find extensive information how the mechanism of
> updates works. Is there development documentation which shows how the source
> code works? So far I haven't seen such papers. I'm not experienced developer
> so I can't trace the source code to see how it works.

The "yum-rhn-plugin" is "up2date" in sheep's clothing. Review the
older, RHEL 4 documentation on "up2date" to understand how it works,
and you can review the source code itself. I understand that it's
based on the "spacewalk" toolkit: you can investigate and even buy
support for RHN in-house, but it's Oracle based, and a significant
configuration burden to run your own.

I don't bother. reposync and yum configurations, baby, with some
manual kickstart integration. For environments of less than 1000
systems, that's plenty if you can do shell scripts or Makefiles
intelligently.