In this repository I have collected some small scripts to set up a local mirror server for Red Hat Repositories. I called it 'poor man's mirror' because it is only capable of providing basic functionallity and could not compete with Red Hat's Satellite server.
You find in each script a short description and comments on how to use it. The following sections give you a short overview, too.
Notice: The branches rhel7 and rhel8 in this repository contain the current stable version for the respective ditribution major version. To use this project just clone or checkout the branch that matches your distribution. New features and bugfixes will be pushed to both branches in case they are compatible with the respective RHEL version.
Request: If you find any errors in the scripts please be so kind and file a short report using the issue function here on GitHub. Since English is not my first language, there might be some mistakes in this text. If you find some please report them, too.
To use the poor man's mirror you need at least:
- A RHEL server with a valid subscription
- A webserver of your choice serving the mirrored repos to other hosts in your LAN
- The packages 'reposync' and 'createrepo' installed
- All other packages needed should be installed via yum dependency resolution
An example for the main configuration file. Copy this file or move it to be named CONFIG before edit and adjusting it to your needs. It contains the variables used by the other scripts to configure the mirror server. Here you specify which repos you would like to mirror and where to save the data.
This is the most important script to create a local Red Hat mirror. It is used to synchronize a RHEL-Repository to a directory on a host in your LAN to build a local mirror server. The server where this script should be used on needs to have a valid subscription for the repository which should be synchronized.
This script creates a YUM-Repository on your host, which could be used to distribute RPM-Packages to other hosts. You could use it to create repos for your own packages or to set up repos for your different stages where you provide the original Red Hat RPMs for each stage.
This script is for the use case where you want to provide separated stage repositories in a staging environment with multiple stages like T-, E-, I-, Q- and P-Stage.
You could use reposync to sync one or more RHEL repos to each stage repo on your local mirror. But this would cost you a large amount of your bandwith and local disk space. With rsync_repo.sh you have to sync the Red Hat repo(s) only once and rsync them to the stage repos. The script uses hardlinks to spare your disk space.
When you have added some new RPM packages to your repository, you have to refresh the metadata DB to be able to install them on connected hosts. This could be done by this script.
In my use case I have four different stages (E, I, Q and P). I use the following wrapper scripts to update them.
- update_rhel-e-stage.sh
- update_rhel-i-stage.sh
- update_rhel-q-stage.sh
- update_rhel-p-stage.sh
Each stage is upated with packages from the stage before, e.g. update_rhel-e-stage.sh calls rsync_repo.sh to rsync the packages from the local mirror to the e-stage-repo, update_rhel-i-stage.sh does the same but uses the packages from the e-stage-repo to rsync them to the i-stage-repo and so on.
In addition I wrote the wrapper update_multiple_stages.sh to call multiple wrappers to update my stage repos.
If you would like to provide Red Hat Errata Information to systems not connected to the internet, you could use this script. You specify the repos on your local mirror where the errata information should be included. The script runs reposync, update your stage repos and implements the errata information. With that you are ready to go, to install Red Hat Advisory on your hosts.
All scripts log their STDOUT to /var/log/<SCRIPTNAME>.log. STDERR is not redirected because I run the scripts via cron and would like to get notifed by email if something was written to STDOUT.