Today I have finally found some time to catch up on my blogging. I’ve got a whole slew of backlogged information that I want to post, so hopefully my fingers (and my brain!) can keep up long enough to get it all published. The topic I wanted to start with today is mrepo: RPM Repository Mirroring made easy. Mrepo is a tool developed by Dag Wieers of rpmforge fame. If you’ve ever run an RPM based distribution (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, etc) you’ve very likely heard of Dag Wieers. He keeps the package machine running and provides those packages not otherwise available in the core repositories. I read that he developed this tool to help streamline the creation and deployment of RPM mirrors and network install servers, which he so often needed in dealing with clients. I used this exact setup to create and maintain an internal repository for our company which supplies network-based installation capabilities for Red Hat Enterprise 3, 4 and 5, CentOS 3, 4 and 5, Fedora 10 and 11, and openSUSE. Read more

I setup a new Desktop at work today and I thought I’d try out Arch again. I’ve had it running on my work Laptop for a few months now, but there were some things I wanted to figure out and learn, “The Arch Way”. One of the little tips that I found in my continued reading and setting up was the use of the rankmirrors tool. Rankmirrors will find and configure your system to use the fastest repository mirrors for your connection. Getting Started Let’s assume you’re on a fresh installation. If not, the steps are really the same, you just likely don’t have to worry about resolving the dependencies. So, on that note, the only dependency for the tool is python. If you don’t have python installed (which is likely only the case if you’re on a fresh installation), you’ll need to install it: pacman -S python<br /> Read more