[BBLISA] Summary: Suggestions for maintaining a RHEL update repository?

[Paul Beltrani]

On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 2:01 PM, Paul Beltrani <spamgrinder at gmail.com> wrote:
> We have a large number of Cent/RHEL systems which we maintain with
> Cobbler, Puppet and YUM.  For  performance, security and control
> reasons we maintain local mirrors of the package repositories.  This
> is extremely easy to do for CentOS.  A simple "reposync" or "cobbler
> reposync" in a cron job keeps our local repository up to date.
> Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a simple way to do this for
> our Red Hat systems.
>
> I'm aware of RHN/up2date/Satellite, but these aren't appropriate in
> this instance for several reasons which I will not waste time on here.
>
> Does anyone have a suggestions how to do this?  If I can't find
> anything simple, we'll most likely fall back to just pulling down the
> ISOs at every point release.
>
>  - Paul Beltrani
>


It's not in Red Hat's business interest to make it easy to mirror
their binary updates.  If you do that, they have no way of knowing how
much you should be paying for support.

After some discussions with our Red Hat sales rep, I was told it is
possible to use a combination of the PERL Frontier::Client module and
the RHN API to automate the process of logging in and downloading the
RPMs.

This will most likely be a suitable solution for what I want to do.

  - Paul Beltrani