On Sun, 13 Jun 2004 09:04:05 -0700, Craig White wrote: > On Sun, 2004-06-13 at 07:48, Allen Winter wrote: >> I have two identical HP notebook machines (mine and my wife's) that I >> just finished installing fresh, new, FC2 loads. I checked the list of >> RPMs and both machines have the identical packages installed -- and I >> want to keep it that way. > I would think that if both systems had the same sources / sources.list for > their up2date-yum/apt that it they would hold together. Seems like the most sensible option, unless one or the other sources config changes for whatever reason. > Otherwise, I know up2date can be configured to 'retain' the rpm's it > downloads and installs and then you can use that to update the other. I > would suppose that yum/apt can probably do the same. If the two laptops can be networked (crossover cable/ WiFi ... etc) then there's a couple of options ... other than the most obvious one above. He could rsync /var/spool/up2date, /var/cache/apt/archives, and /var/cache/yum across the two systems, or he could set one up as a YUM/APT repo for the other. The repo system is safer, since even if the sources config changes on the master (server) system, the slave (client) system will always have the same package lists. It also saves downloading the same updates twice. I have several systems here, although they're not all running the same distributions (E.g. Debian Sarge), but to save duplication and bandwidth, all downloads of any nature are done on the server (i.e. it is acting as a cache proxy in that respect), so all I need to do is configure the clients to fetch packages etc from there. This isn't necessarily a trivial matter if there are multiple Operating Systems accessing the server, but in the OPs case, a small fileserver would fit his purposes nicely. I've seen some good reviews of sub £1000 1U Gigabyte servers in the print magazines recently. There was one in particular that caught my eye, with a dual Opteron mobo, but sold for around £850 configured with just one CPU - with an easy upgrade path. I guess splashing out on a server, for home use, might seem a bit OTT, but it is honestly the single most useful thing I own. Set it up for ssh, NFS, CUPS, Apache, Squid, Privoxy, ftpd, iptables, sendmail, CVS, APT, YUM and up2date - check security alerts and log files once a day - and forget it. Of course he could always just recycle an old PC for the job. My first server was the remains of my first ever PC ... a P1 166Mhz machine with a whopping 128MB of ram and a 7GB hard drive, running RH5.1 :) - K. My next PC's a Blade Server ;-)
