Yum offline updating

Scenario:

You have multiple SME servers to update, but don't want to download the udpates over-and-over again at each system.

Solution:

If you have another server that has been updated using yum you may be able to:

copy all the updated rpms from the local yum cache into a single folder
move that folder to the SME server(s) that still need updating
update yum locally

If you're lucky you will have all the dependencies in your update folder.

Procedure

Here are the specific folders you'll need to include (assuming you have no contribs installed from non-standard repositories):

/var/cache/yum/base/packages
/var/cache/yum/addons/packages
/var/cache/yum/smeos/packages
/var/cache/yum/smeaddons/packages
/var/cache/yum/smeupdates/packages

You can copy these package files to the other servers in many different ways. Including, but not limited to: scp, sftp, winscp, rsync.

Or you may choose to move the packages into a single shared directory (or ibay) and mount the share/ibay from the other server(s).

In either case, change to your local sme store on the system to be udpated and execute:

 yum localupdate *

Alternatively, you could download all of the rpms from the SME repos and leave only the upstream updates to download on each system. Download all rpms from each of the following locations and put them on a USB disk, CDROM, or network share for transport from system to system:

smeos: ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/smeserver/releases/7.3/smeos/i386/SME/RPMS

smeupdates: ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/smeserver/releases/7.3/smeupdates/i386/RPMS

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