I intend to use 15.0 for at least three to five years, after which I will upgrade to the latest available version of OpenSUSE.
I also notice that OpenSUSE removes repositories when a specific version has been discontinued. For 15.0, this discontinuation date is supposedly some time in November this year.
Thus I need to clone the entire 15.0 repository to ensure that it remains available for my use until at least 2022. How much space do I need to create a local clone of the entire repository, and how do I go about doing it?
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Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SLES 15 | GNOME Shell 3.26.2 | 4.12.14-25.28-default
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Also,
Since the next LEAP version is a minor upgrade (15.1), depending on your reasons for staying on 15.0, the upgrade from 15.0.15.1 is expected to be relatively painless and will ensure official support through patching and component updates for the next year and a half or so… Until approx 2022(?).
I need instructions on how to clone the complete OpenSUSE repositories and then add these cloned repos to zypper so that the official mirrors can be removed from the repo list.
This way, any future packages can be retrieved locally and will not require going online. Which is important for keeping OpenSUSE 15.0 around for at least 3 -5 more years. I will not be upgrading to OpenSUSE 15.1 or 15.2 or 15.x during this period at all and I want OpenSUSE 15.0 with all its existing repositories ‘frozen’ permanently in local storage.
I want to clone the entire repo to $HOME/Downloads and make zypper recognize it as THE de facto OpenSUSE repository.
There is completely no reason to do all those complicated Apache httpd config for such things. Why the heck will I need to install a web server just for such purposes?
Hi
If you looked through the article instead of lambasting the Forum users, it has the rsync command in there to use and configure as your require.
There was a Forum post yesterday where a user is using rsync to mirror a repository.
If you don’t want to run a server (and the mirror does not need to be public), then need to use rsync or ftp to pull the repo down, then you need to look at createrepo (don’t forget to add the repo keys), do you need debug packages?
That’s OK – the “How To” is for the general case – you simply have to leave out the bits related to setting up a public mirror …
But, up until now, you didn’t mention that, you didn’t want to set up the mirror on a private server within your private network …
In other words, your single machine has an enormous user partition which has enough free space alongside everything else that your doing – including running the application which absolutely needs a frozen Leap 15.0 after the “End of life” date …
Given the need to securely backup at least the mirrored repositories, IMHO, this is an extremely dangerous method of maintaining Leap 15.0 repositories for years after the EOL date …
May I suggest that, you look into setting up a NAS with at least a 3-disk RAID, better a 5-disk RAID, on your private network, for the mirrored repositories.
Ideally, despite the RAID, that NAS should also have access to a magnetic tape system for regular backups of the mirrored repositories …
You won’t need to setup a Web Server on the NAS – simply setting up an NFS export for the directory containing the mirrored repositories will be sufficient …
The client machine(s) on your private network can simply NFS auto-mount the YaST/Zypper repositories located on the private NAS …
Replicate the OSS (and any other repo) to a location you manage, likely in your local network. There are probably plenty of options how to do this, rsync is probably recommended most often but most likely because it enables you to easily update your copy should the source change which would not be the case with the OSS. Since the OSS doesn’t change… You can simply use the DVD which is not exactly the same but pretty close and may be sufficient. You can do a regular “cp -r” but for something this large it’s anyone’s guess how well it will work. I expect you could probably use any cloning tool, too., I haven’t tried using dd in this kind of job, but it might work. The problem with dd though is that there is no built in error checking and correction so for a very big job like this over a long distance, you’d be relying on TCP only (in the TCP/IP) which might not be sufficient. Rsync might be a bit of overkill but still be the best tool that ensures a successful result.
Once you have a copy of the repo, you can set up your repo a number of different ways. If you copied the repo metadata with your repo, I’d expect that it should be all set up to be served as a yum type of repo (or whatever type, the yum format was used a long time ago when I did this). But zypper is very flexible and will support simple file and by extension likely network paths so you really do have maximum flexibility, even without a server for setting up and pointing to your repo. In other words, you don’t have to set up a web or ftp server like what is done with public repos.
Disable or remove the default repo entry that points to the default OSS, and create a new repo with path to your local repo.
I don’t think I’m missing any steps, and I hope the additional info I provided you is enough for you to set up successfully.
