Centralized software repository management

Pulp Sensation

Article from ADMIN 04/2011

By Thorsten Scherf

If you use free software, you will likely need to manage multiple software repositories and keep all the information up to date. Pulp gives you a centralized approach to repository management.

Pulp helps administrators consolidate multiple software repositories centrally. To allow this to happen, Pulp can access a variety of sources; for example, you can just as easily query a regular Yum server as you can access the Red Hat Network or software packages hosted by a web server.

Pulp [1] doesn't act as a proxy between the clients and the various repositories; instead, it mirrors the packages locally and updates the packages at regular intervals. Obviously, this means that you need to provide a large amount of storage space up front.

That said, Pulp can shift individual repositories out to external servers, which are referred to as content delivery servers. To do so, the central server simply routes client requests to external servers, which then respond to the requests. This approach makes it pretty easy to establish geographically distributed systems. Thanks to highly granular access rules, Pulp makes sure that clients can only query specific repositories. User authentication can take place against an LDAP server, which makes it possible to deploy Pulp in very large environments.

The software also has impressive reporting capabilities. Administrators not only have access to the history feature that shows which client system accessed which repository and when, they can also view the package status of the clients at any time. Thus, it is quite easy to discover systems that have not yet installed an important update package. If you are interested in experimenting, you will probably appreciate the fact that Pulp offers an API that supports convenient scripting of regularly recurring tasks. Figure 1 shows the architecture of a Pulp environment.

...

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).