Yum auto mirroring?

[Les Mikesell]

Tim wrote:
>
>> I would like to speed things up by hosting some form of mirroring on
>> my Centos5 box.
>>
>> I am thinking Squid, but not sure if that's the best solution.
>>
>> Des anyone have success stories? Squid or otherwise? Ideally I could
>> just set yum only to use a squid port, but yum doesn't seem to
>> directly support proxies, just indirectly via ENV variables.
> 
> Looking at man yum.conf
> 
>        proxy  url to the proxy server that yum should use.
> 
>        proxy_username
>               username to use for proxy
> 
>        proxy_password
>               password for this proxy
> 
> I'm using 7 at the moment, see if Fedora 9 has the same options.  If so,
> set each YUM to use your proxy, and always the same mirror (comment out
> the mirror list, set pick a specific baseurl URI.
> 
> This should work, we used to do the same with Windows to speed up
> Windows Update (cache through Squid), it made a huge difference.

You can always export any variable on the command line like:
http_proxy=http://proxy.domain.com:port_number yum update
for example, to point to a squid configured to cache large files.  The 
problem is that the concept of changing the mirrorlist to a specific URI 
doesn't work well for a set of people who maintain their own machines 
and don't know/care what distribution/version others are using even 
though they are in the same building behind the same proxy cache - and 
it's not that great to have to edit files on every machine to get 
reasonable behavior even if the people do manage to coordinate this.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com