I was also thinking about a sym link or hard link approach to save disk space. There is a cobbler hard link command mentioned on some of the online docs but this is not mentioned in the man page that I was reading but might be due to the version I am using. See this hard link flag made me wonder if there were already a solution in place. If I put some more thought into this... would this be something that is useful other people and could potentially be implemented more generically?

Regards

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 12:17 PM, Christian Horn <chorn@fluxcoil.net> wrote:

Hi,

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 12:08:44PM +0100, Gerhardus Geldenhuis wrote:
> I looked around through the documentation but could not get a description of
> how to do "repo" snapshots. I might have missed it or not have a full grasp
> or understanding yet but would appreciate anyone sharing thoughts on how to
> do it.
>
> Very simply I want to be able using only cobbler to create a snapshot of a
> repository and called it for example RH5.6-Feb which should contain the base
> repo plus all updates that has been releases up until that point. I want to
> be able to then create monthly snapshots for example and when I build a
> server build it against one of these snapshots. If you can already do this
> in cobbler I would appreciate some guidance or if not if anyone could share
> how they achieve this with cobbler.

I think this is not implemented, you should be able to do it yourself for
repos that you host (have locally as files):
- 'cp -r /part/repo /part/reposnapshot'
- 'cobbler repo copy ...' to make the snapshot known to cobbler

> You can do this in spacewalk but I am
> not sure how much is spacewalk and how much is cobbler and I am keen to not
> re-invent the wheel. For various reasons at the moment unfortunately I can't
> use spacewalk to manage this so the solution has to be native to cobbler.

Cobbler is maintaining the repo just as a whole, spacewalk knows about the
packages inside. That way a clone of a channel in spacewalk (what you call
snapshot) happens mainly in the database, without creating copies of files.

I think you could be fine with the cobbler approach. This one needs more
diskspace, yet that could be reduced in creating hardlinks for files that
exist in multiple repos.

Christian
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--
Gerhardus Geldenhuis