Downloading CentOS patch repositories

CentOS patch repositories must always be entirely downloaded before performing patch analysis because the metadata required for analysis is stored in the patch files themselves.  

Downloading the patches

BMC does not currently provide any downloaders for CentOS patches. However, many third-party utilities are available for this purpose.

• Reposync is a tool available in the yum-utils package.
• mrepo is a community-supported tool that uses a variety of download methods to maintain yum repositories.
• A scripted solution that uses rsync, ftp, wget, or any other command line utility. 

BMC does not specifically endorse any of these utilities or have any affiliation with them. Other tools might be available to perform the download actions for CentOS patches.

Organize your directory structure in such a way that patches for a particular distribution and architecture are downloaded into a unique directory. For example, on your patch helper server, you might create the following directories:

• /patch
• /patch/cos5x86
• /patch/cos5x86_64
• /patch/cos6x86
• /patch/cos6x86_64
• /patch/cos7x86_64

Generating metadata

After the patches are downloaded, you must generate the metadata using the createrepo utility.

For createrepo version 0.9.8 or earlier run the following command:

For createrepo version 0.9.9 or later run the following command:

Then zip up the generated repodata directory so that a repodata.zip is stored in /patch/cos5x86 along with the generated repodata directory:

Defining the repository

After generating metadata for each repository, you must define the repository in the <install dir>/patch/linuxpu/Work/linuxrepo.conf file.  In this file, use the following format:

For the example directories listed in Downloading the patches above, the linuxrepo.conf file would contain the following lines: