Other Mirror Red Hat Repository on FreeBSD

[UnixRocks]

Admins, please move this thread if needed. I am not sure where this topic would be appropriate, so I am starting here since I have a work repo server that is running FreeBSD and uses several bash scripts + rsync to mirror some Linux repositories off The Internet.

As stated, I have a work repo server running on FreeBSD that serves several mirrored repos for our internal network hosts that are blocked from The Internet. Today I am tasked with adding a RHEL mirror to this. The "solutions" I am finding on The Internet all presume the local host is a RHEL host and to use tools that are only on RHEL. Is anyone here able to point me to a resource on how to mirror RHEL package repos on FreeBSD? Thanks in advance.

 

[diizzy]

Run bhyve and have the VM mirror it to a NFS share that's on the host machine?

 

[UnixRocks]

My FreeBSD host is a guest in a VMware vCenter and has minimal resources. Thanks for the suggestion, but that is a non-starter for me at this point.

 

[UnixRocks]

This was suggested on IRC:

https://pagure.io/quick-fedora-mirror claims it can do it with zsh, rsync, awk and "the usual core utilities" (and we have dnf in ports, so maybe you could port this "createrepo_c" and do it like https://trivialfis.github.io/linux/2017/02/11/Create-a-local-mirror-with-dnf.html)

Going to look into that.

 

[Eric A. Borisch]

I like use www/nginx to create a proxy_pass connection on a system that can be reached from your boxes-to-upgrade and also has internet access (like a mirror would have to have). This will dynamically cache packages as they are accessed (for a configurable time), and can provide similar performance boosts (for repeated uses) without having to mirror everything.

 

[UnixRocks]

I like use www/nginx to create a proxy_pass connection ...

That is an interesting idea. I will look at that too. Thanks!

 

[vermaden]

I used `reposync` but I do not know if it works on FreeBSD - I used it on Linux systems:

- https://github.com/Zextras/reposync

- https://github.com/odjones/reposync

 

[UnixRocks]

I used `reposync` but I do not know if it works on FreeBSD - I used it on Linux systems: ,,,

There is not a package nor a port for that:

[... ~]$ pkg search reposync
[... ~]$ locate reposync
[... ~]$

Sadly I am not a talented programmer who could port that to FreeBSD.

 

[vermaden]

You would have to try to fetch and run the ones from GitHub ... I know there is nothing like that in the Ports tree ... but You can also try Linux Binary Compatibility on FreeBSD - maybe that would help.

 

[UnixRocks]

Just to make this complete. We have a different division of the company that already has an in-house RHEL repository. Since that division is firewalled from our division I put in a service ticket to get them to stand up a rsync server on that host, get a hole poked in the firewall for our host to reach the rsync server, then I will create a bash script to pull the repo from their host to ours using rsync. This is so RHEL systems on our side of the firewall that have no internet access will be able to pull RHEL packages from our host they can already reach.

Thank you all for your suggestions.

 

[Snail]

I am pretty sure that reposync used to be available on freebsd, at the yum era.
It was available as a separate package (from yum).
But redhat replaced yum with dnf and reposync became a plugin. I mean it is run as "dnf reposync".
This plugin is not available on freebsd so this is a dead end.

I ended installing a redhat machine to mirror repositories on my freebsd server through NFS.

Of course, the fact I failed does not mean this is impossible and that you can't do it.
If you succeed, I would be more than happy to know how.