On 9/23/2010 3:56, Arnau Bria wrote:
> My question was: why SL recommends "low level" tools and not "advanced"
> ones? Is there any problem with mrepo (which also does a cretearepo) ?
> Is a simple rsync/ftp the best way for doing the mirror?
>
> We're using mrepo (with createrepo) and we're moving to cobbler (a
> higher level tool for repos/distro/install...) and we can sleect
> a new way for mirroring distros. So, if mrpeo (with its createrepo,
> blah, blah...) is not recommmended, we're on time to change to pure
> rsync/ftp.

SL's documentation just concerns what protocol you use to pull packages 
from other mirrors, not what you do with the stuff you download 
afterwards.  If you're running a private mirror you should ideally 
download them with rsync to transfer less data.  What you do with your 
mirror after that is up to you.  To meed SL's mirroring guidelines you 
should just set cobbler to mirror with rsync.

Note that it is rarely necessary for cobbler to run createrepo on 
rsync'ed repos since the mirror you're syncing from should already have 
good metadata.  You can make cobbler skip the createrepo step by adding 
"--help" or an invalid option to the repo's createrepo_flags and you 
should still get a perfectly valid mirror without burning lots of CPU 
time re-hashing every package.

If you are running a public mirror, some distributions will require you 
to *not* run createrepo so repodata remain consistent across all 
mirrors.  I am not sure whether this is the case for SL or not.

-- 
Garrett Holmstrom
University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy
Systems Staff