Persistent package cache for Zypper ?

Hi,

I’m planning to replace all client desktops in our local school - currently running CentOS - with OpenSUSE Leap 15.0 KDE. Since we’re in a rather remote place, bandwidth is a bit limited, so I’d like to setup a package cache to manage updates faster.

Under Debian and Ubuntu, there’s the excellent apt-cacher utility.

Under CentOS, there’s nothing comparable, so I managed to find a solution that works quite nicely. I’ve mounted all the local package caches over NFS and configured all the clients to keep packages in the cache and never delete them. I’ve described the whole procedure in a blog article.

Now I’d like to do something similar with OpenSUSE. There seems to be no apt-cacher (or zypp-cacher) around, so I thought I’d give it a shot with keeping RPM packages in a local cache and share it via NFS, like I did with CentOS. The latter can be configured in /etc/yum.conf never to delete packages by setting keepcache=1. I couldn’t manage to find anything similar for Zypper.

Any suggestions ?

Here’s how I am doing it:

Sharing updates with opensuse

It works pretty well. The linked mailing list discussion also has other suggestions, such as using a caching web proxy.

Here’s what I did ages ago in a similar situation:

  • disable the Update repo(s) on all machines
  • rsync the content of the Update repo URL selectively to /some/folder on the server
  • export /some/folder through NFS
  • create a local repo on all machines, incl. server pointing to /some/folder

Worked fine.