New subject: doughnuts on a fish hook

27 Aug 2003


      Magnus wrote:
...
On Tuesday, August 26, 2003, at 07:17 PM, Jay Turner wrote:
Actually, following up on my own post, I need to clarify
something.  The license for RHEL 2.1 states that if you have
support (which includes RHN) for one install, then you will have
it for all installations. So, in that case, if you are in
compliance, then all of your installations would have RHN
support and there would be no need to download the errata from
RHN then push it out to other machines. Sorry for the confusion.


Well, there *is* a need actually.
Let's say Joe has 50 RHEL servers, all pretty much identical, and
properly licensed. There is a flurry of security activity one week
and it takes about 50MB of new packages to patch one system. That's
not much of a reach.  Each of the 50 servers downloads 50MB of
packages through https (i.e. not cached anywhere) over Joe's single
business class DSL connection. 2500MB of downloads, split up across
50 clients, all hitting a DSL connection at once (not to mention the
RHN servers). This is lunacy.
Better than Daniel's recent suggestion, IMHO is the useNoSSLForPackages
option.  Point all of your servers at the same squid proxy, turn on the
use no SSL option, and all is well.
On that note, there's no good reason for packages to be downloaded via
SSL, since they're all GPG signed anyway.  Can we have
useNoSSLForPackages=1 made the default in the next version of RHL?
-- 
Paul
http://paulgear.webhop.net

Re: doughnuts on a fish hook