[ILUG] SuSE Yast Online Update

[Drew Ferguson]

On Thursday 11 July 2002 09:20, Niall O Broin wrote:
> I just used SuSE's Yast Online Update for the first time and I'm impressed
> - seems to work quite nicely and it's free as in beer, unlike RedHat's
> version. (Debian bigots can just save their electrons). However, I have a
> number of SuSE 8 boxes to maintain and I'd rather not use the bandwidth to
> update them all online. In the YOU options you can select expert mode where
> you can select a local server. However, there's no information as to how
> you might populate such a local server. Anyone have any ideas ?

I would reckon you would need to setup a SuSE tree on one system, ftp the 
updates to there from suse.com and then point all machines at the tree. You 
could probably have the suse update mirrored automatically to save even more 
effort.

Off to try this myself...

...after a while I finally figured how to do it

on your primary server make a tree like this (assuming you have i386 and suse 
v8.0 - change accordingly)

	[root-dir]/i386/update/8.0

under there ftp/copy contents of the update tree on the suse site. 
Specifically you need a dir called patches plus the regular suse package 
trees - a1,a2,d1, etc

Now you can point your YOU expert to Harddisk/Network looking at [root-dir]
and it will find and recommend updates.

The only problem with this is the suse updates tree is so full of junk you 
wouldn't really want it taking up disk space and it requires a lot of 
download time and effort to copy everything. Making a mirror of the tree 
might be appropriate if you have a *lot* of systems with differing configs.

As an alternative, you can populate your own tree with just the updates you 
want - for each package you will need at least
	patches/package.num
	[tree]/package-release.rpm
	[tree]/package-release.patch.rpm 
	[tree]/@package.rpm (points to latest release)
and optionally
	[tree]/package-release_en.info 
There are a few files left out (like *_de.info and INDEX), I don't think they 
will be needed.

There is a convenient empty tree under /var/lib/Yast/patches that might help 
(empty the patches dir); this is where your downloaded patches are stored so 
it might be useful to catch auto update patches.

As a short-cut to save you some thinking time, you can keep the patches dir 
filled as per the ftp site; this will show you which packages you need to 
update and why - if you try to update one for which you have not downloaded 
the actual rpm, YOU will just gurn and winge and you can abort that actual 
update till you get the rpm. Or some other mechanism.

This is a practical hack and may <put favourite disclaimer here>

Drew