A local mirrored yum repository is a copy of the standard yum repositories for CentOS that exists on your local network. It is kept up to date by synchronizing to an external site. If you have more than a few local hosts, using a local mirrored repo can significantly reduce internet traffic and speed up the update process.<\/p>\n
This blog describes how to create, sync, test and use a local mirrored repo for CentOS 6.4. You will be shown how to create the repo, keep it in sync using cron, test the implementation and how to update the \/etc\/yum.repos.d directory on each host. It also provides 4 bash scripts that you can customize for your site to make maintenance easier.
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<\/a><\/p>\n When you type “yum update” on a standard CentOS installation your site is updated from an external site that is randomly chosen from a list of mirrored repositories on the internet. The packages that need to be updated are detected by comparing version information from your site with the version information from the external site and then downloaded through the internet.<\/p>\n For a small number of hosts this works really well because most packages are small and there normally only a few that are updated at a time but once your network grows to more that a small number of hosts, keeping them all in sync can result in a fair amount of internet traffic. <\/p>\n Please note that the term “a small number of hosts” is deliberately vague. Some sites with a slow internet connection would probably see significant performance improvements once they reached 3 or 4 hosts whereas others with a very fast, fat pipe might not see any improvement until they had dozens of hosts. In my case I decided to switch over when I had about 20.<\/p>\n To reduce the internet traffic overhead associated with updating multiple hosts on your network, you can create a local mirrored repository that acts just like an external repository (which is, itself, mirrored). If you have a large site with a fast, fat internet pipe you should consider becoming an external repository to help the community.<\/p>\n This blog describes how to create the local repository, how to keep it synchronized, how to test it and how to update the \/etc\/yum.repos.d directories on your hosts to make it all work.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n The first thing that you need to do is determine where you want the local repository to reside. It must be a network resource that is visible to all of the hosts that want to use it. I use an NFS mount. For the purposes of this discussion we will assume that the network path to the mirrored repository is “ Second you need to choose an administrative host that can create\/update the repo directories and run the cron job to keep it in sync. For this discussion we will use the host “ Finally you need to determine which repositories you want to mirror. That decision is going to be site dependent but for me I chose the centos_6.4_extras, centos_6.4_os, centos_6.4_updates and elrepo_el6 repositories. The repositories with the “centos_” prefix. The repository with the “elrepo_el6” prefix is from the elrepo<\/a> repository. It contains lots of useful stuff that is not in the standard release.<\/p>\n To see the repositories that you reference by default, take a look at the “ Here is a summary of the site configuration:<\/p>\nIntroduction<\/h1>\n
Site Configuration Parameters<\/h1>\n
\/shared\/repo\/<\/code>“.<\/p>\nbigbob<\/code>“.<\/p>\n\/etc\/yum.repos.d\/*repo<\/code> files on your system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n