[SOLVED] Good proxy for yum

[DrHappyAngry]

So I'm just coming over from Ubuntu after getting sick of the issues I've had on my desktop, and so far liking FC16. I'm just wondering what people are using to share updates between multiple computers? I've used apt-cacher and apt-cacher-ng for the debian based distros, but not sure what'd do a similar job for yum. I saw mrepo, but I got the impression that I'd be just copying the RPMs from one machines local cache, setting it up in my own repo, and then configuring the other machines to pull from that repo. I'd like something more like apt-cacher, where all machines can just use it, and if a newer file's available or doesn't exist in the cache, it's just downloaded on it's own.

I know I can just mirror the repos, but that's a waste of bandwidth and storage space, since I don't need that much out of them.

I found tons of stuff on how to configure yum to use a proxy, but nothing on a proxy specifically for yum. Is squid or some other standard web proxy the best solution? I can have up to a half a dozen desktop/laptop boxes, plus a couple servers around, so it greatly speeds up the setup and update process.

I suppose I could just setup another nfs share on my file server and have all the computers use that as their RPM cache as well. That certainly seems easier than dealing with squid.

[DrHappyAngry]

OK, so apparently NFS is a bad choice, since sqlite doesn't play nicely on it. I wound up doing polipo for the proxy, and just set the cache to not expire for a long time, and let it get up to 100GBs. I picked polipo, since it'll probably be easy to make it work with windows update down the road.

The problem with using a proxy as a package cache, is by default a lot of stuff is set to use a mirrorlist instead of an absolute URL. This causes problems, since you'll pull from a random server, and wind up pulling packages down multiple times whenever you pull from a different server. To solve this I removed the mirrorlist line from all the repo files for fedora in /etc/yum.repos.d and pointed them to the kernel.org mirror. For the RPMFusion repos I pointed them right to their servers instead of the mirrorlist. I picked kernel.org since it's always fast where I'm at, should be secure since they brought it back up after the breech, and is pure http. Polipo won't work as an ftp proxy, and the default fedora repo will sometimes try to use FTP. Kernel.org always uses http, so no problems there.

This is pretty sweet, now. I can roll through a scripted setup really fast after the initial install now. Just run a script to set the proxy, disable the mirrorlists, install my package lists, setup nfs mounts, setup fonts, disable selinux, enable SSH, open SSH on the firewall, etc. Nice to just be able install a box, run the script, walk away, come back and have just about everything setup. All the packages come through the proxy now, and it works awesome. If anyone wants more detailed instructions on how to set this up, I can provide them.