Phil Clayton <phil.clayton@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Hi everyone, > > I have an isolated network of computers (i.e. behind a 'firewall' made > of air so no access to the net) but would like to be able to use yum > on the network. Simple enough - I have set up a yum server on this > network. My issue is that I would like to avoid maintaining a full > yum mirror. A full mirror would waste resources (time, disk space, > net usage) because I would be downloading and transferring gigabytes > of rpms that aren't actually required. For generic answers, on how to minimize downloads for multiple computers we have: http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumMultipleMachineCaching ...however none of those are going to work well for "air gap" type isolated networks, apart from just mirroring and copying across the air gap by hand. > The solution I have in mind is to use yum on a different computer that > is attached to the net to download the necessary packages and then > transfer them. However, this computer won't have the same set up: it > is i386, not x86_64; Fedora 10, not Fedora 11; has different packages > installed. > > So my question is: it is possible for yum or associated utils to > operate relative to a package list and architecture that differs from > what is actually installed on the system? (All documentation that I > have read suggests that yum always takes the system's current state.) For the API, it's very possible, however I can't think of any scripts that would just work¹. And you'll either need to know of every rpm installed on every system behind the air gap, and then download the rpms needed ... or download the metadata first, and then collect the list of rpms needed on each system, and then transfer that data back and download those rpms. The former is nicer to work with, but is probably much more work (esp. to get the depsolving correct, esp. with respect to plugins). Also note that "yum install blah" will be painful. However I do have plans to, in the next week or so, look at creating something so you can mirror much more bandwidth efficiently than rsync. The obvious solution here being to integrate presto into reposync. This should then mean that disk space is the only significant reason to not just mirror all of Fedora updates. ¹ There has been work on doing this kind of thing, IIRC mostly to do with putting the downloaded rpms on CD and then using that "updates CD" in each machine in the air gap network. But I can't find any active projects atm. -- James Antill -- james@xxxxxxx _______________________________________________ Yum mailing list Yum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.baseurl.org/mailman/listinfo/yum
