“In my last tip, we set up a single internal YaST Online Update server to pick up updated software from the SuSE mirrors. Now, we’re going to answer the question: how do clients connect to the server? In setting up the single internal YaST Online Update server, the idea was to minimize the load on the existing mirrors by having one machine hit the outside servers, instead of however many client machines you have, and enhance security by keeping updates inside your firewall.”
I have a Gentoo setup where one computer syncs with an outside mirror and the rest of the computers sync with that computer. It really is a convenient and easy setup. It seems that SuSE doesn’t make it much harder to do. I think that this is an important and necessary step when you have multiple computers running the same distribution, especially when it is a community supported distribution like Gentoo. There is no need to stress the servers and stress their bandwith especially when you can have a 100/1000 Mpbs link directly to your own update server! Now I just have to set up an NFS mount for my “/usr/portage/distfiles” directory and ease all the servers providing source code.
on mandriva you can just use urpmi’s parallel feature. every day I do:
urpmi.update -a
urpmi –parallel local –auto-select -v
on zen, my desktop. It checks with the members of parallel group ‘local’ – itself, htpc, and toy (my other two machines) – what updates are needed on each, goes and downloads them from my urpmi media, scp’s the required files to each machine, and performs the upgrade. No need to set up a complete urpmi repository on any of my machines.
Well I don’t have a repository either because Gentoo doesn’t really use them. Portage will download sources directly from the original site. There are mirrors also but It’s not really a repository in the same sense. My rsync machine is actually used to do other things (I have eight altogether) but it also syncs up once a day to the gentoo rsync mirrors. The only thing I really have to do is make one of my computers server up the distfiles directory as an NFS mount and then all my computers can access the sources that are download without going over the internet. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet because I am searching for a small HD to accomplish this.
Right, I wasn’t really comparing to your Gentoo setup but to the original article (where one machine is really set up as a YOU server).
It seems an even more available way to do this (without SuSE Enterprise) is to use http-replicator (http://freshmeat.net/projects/http-replicator/). It is written entirely in python, can stream multiple copies of one file as it is proxying, etc. A pretty slick proxy, not to mention that it uses nice names for the files it proxies. I use this on my home network for ~6 machines (yeah, all of them have SuSE 10), and it makes updating bearable over a 56k modem.