[CentOS] Spacewalk? Local repo? Cache?

On Mon, 29 Sep 2014, Chris Beattie wrote:

> I have a mix of CentOS 5, 6, and now 7 servers at work.  There are 
> enough of them now that it is starting to make sense for them to get 
> updates from an internal source.
>
> I've seen RHN Satellite in years past.  It looks like it may be a 
> way to allow Windows admins here (familiar with WSUS) to update 
> Linux boxes.  A local repo might be easier to set up, but (as with 
> Spacewalk) it seems like we'd end up with a lot of packages we don't 
> need.  A proxy and a sufficiently-large cache might do the trick if 
> the first Linux box to get updates populates the cache which the 
> files the others will need, but I haven't looked into this enough to 
> see if there's even a way that works.
>
> How do you all keep a dozen or more Linux boxes updated?

We keep local repos for CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu -- plus some 
smaller repos like OpenBSD -- on an older machine with a RAID-5 array. 
The faster moving distributions are updated a couple time a day, while 
CentOS is updated just once per day. Right now, disk usage on that 
machine is about 2.5TB.

Debian and Ubuntu have some distro-specific scripts we use (ftpsync 
and ubumirror, respectively), while I update CentOS and Fedora with 
fairly unremarkable cron jobs. Under the hood, all these tools use 
rsync.

All installations and updates are done from the local mirrors; we use 
cfengine to make sure the /etc/yum.repos.d/* or /etc/apt/* files point 
to the right spot.

-- 
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45°38' N, 122°6' W