Today I created a yum repository

This is what happens when you are at work and you have ISOs for the 6 CDs of CentOS 5.2 but NOT the DVD, and no connection to the 'net… I couldn't use the 5.2 installer thanks to ​this bug (it's an embedded Celeron 650). Since I went thru all the work, I also then imported the directory as a "shared folder" under VMWare player and then did the same upgrade path on that machine (I want it to mirror the embedded machine for all versions of everything, except it also has the gcc suite, etc).

One Time Only

(This can be done on any Linux machine with the external drive connected)

• I mounted the external drive under Linux and there are the 6 ISO CDs. I mounted each and then upgraded what was on it that we already had installed.
• cd /media/ext_drive/<install dir>
• mkdir mnt
• mount -o ro,loop <CDFILE>.iso mnt
• cp -urv mnt/CentOS .
  • If I were doing this again, I may mount the 6 as /mnt1 thru /mnt6 and then try to use cp -l to make links?
  • (Optionally in another window to watch progress: watch -d 'lsof -c cp -s | cut -c37- | grep rpm ' )
• umount mnt
• (Repeat for all 6 - this gives us a CentOS subdir with all the RPMs. If I had the DVD instead of the 6 CDs, this would've been easier)
• Now we will make this new directory into an "official" repository
• cd CentOS
• rpm -i createrepo*rpm (glad that was there!)
• mkdir repo_cache
• createrepo -v -p -d -c repo_cache --update --skip-stat .
  • This step takes forever (even longer than the copying above)
  • With a DVD image, this is most likely not even needed!

Every Target Machine

• We need to disable all the remote repositories:
  • Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo and add enabled=0 to every section
  • Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Media.repo and change to enabled=1
    • Depending on where the external hard drive is, baseurl will need an added path to it
      • When I did it, it was file:///media/ext_drive/LinuxInstallers/CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-1to6/CentOS/
    • There is a ​known bug in 5.1 - the GPG signature key should be RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5 (not "beta")
• yum clean all
• yum install yum-protect-packages
• yum upgrade yum
• yum clean all
• yum upgrade --exclude=kernel\* -y | tee upgrade.log
  • (Optionally in another window to watch progress: watch -n1 'lsof -c yum -s | cut -c43- | grep rpm ' )
• grep warn upgrade.log
  • For this, you need to diff each file with the .rpmnew file or .rpmold file and merge them together.
• Reboot!