Managing custom quaterly channels in 5.6.0

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Hi All,

Im planning to roll out a quarterly patch set of channels for my small linux estate (less than 50 servers).

My plan is to do the following:

  • take a clone of the Redhat channels (that sync with Redhat every night) every quarter and store them in a separe child channel of the Linux version they refer to i.e.

Rhel 6 x86_64 Server (parent channel owned by Redhat)
EPEL
Server Optional
etc...

Rhel 6 (parent channel created by me) (empty)
RHEL 6 2016 Q4 (clone of Rhel 6 x84_64 Server parent channel above)
RHEL 6 2017 Q1
RHEL 6 2017 Q2

  • also take a quaterly clone of the Server Optional, EPEL, Hardware Tools, etc channels and store them separate child channels under the Rhel 6 parent.

This ensures all servers are patched to the same level (e.g. 2017 Q1, 2017 Q2, etc), but it seems like a massive overhead and the Rhel 6 parent channel will get very large (4 channel clones per channel per year (Q1,Q2,Q3,Q4)).

Other options I've considered are:

  • leaving eveything assigned to the RHEL owened parent channel and doing 'yum update' up to a certain date manually, i.e. not doing any clones. Not sure this is best as I also have a number of custom child channels and not sure if I can store these under the main RHEL owned parent channel.

  • creating the clone structure above, but updating the same child channels with updats every quarter. ie. not having q1,q2,q3,q4 for each channel, but only one instead...

Just wondered what people would suggest, if all my ideas are rubbish, or if im kinda going down the right path!

Cheers,
Matt

MR

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