A few thoughts on mirroring...
"Cobbler import" provides a way of keeping the network demands of
running a large install farm under control -- that is, kickstart tree
content doesn't have to come from public mirrors. This means faster
installs, less bandwidth, and in general being nice to community
provided mirrors. One thing that cobbler hasn't been doing is to
integrate this with a good repository mirroring strategy. Installs
from public and private data ought to come in through the boot server,
not the local university every time.
I'm looking fairly closely at reposync and plain rsync right now...
rsync would have some disadvantage in that it would generally bring down
too much content, for instance, say you weren't interested in KDE.
Comments? Thoughts? What tools are folks already using to do this?
Tenatively, I see this looking something like
cobbler repo add --name=foo --mirror=URL
and putting something like
"cobbler repo sync" on a crontab.
Then, each cobbler profile would have a new optional property
("--repos") that would give information about what repositories to use
by default.
cobbler profile add --name=p1 --distro=d1 --repos="fc6updates fc6extras
myspecialfc6repo"
If a distribution being detected in an import is greater than "FC6", we
know that we can add repo's directly in the kickstart based on the
"repo" directive, otherwise, we'll have to tweak the kickstarts slightly
differently. All of the repo assignment could be automagically
filled in during kickstart templating (which is done at "cobbler sync"
time).
--Michael
