[KLUG Members] OpenSuSe Patch CDs

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> > > > Anyone know if/where patch CD images for OpenSuSe are available?
> > > No, but I know how to make them.
> > > The only problem is after you get past 700MB of updates, it becomes a
> > > patch DVD.  (I don't know how to selectively choose the updates)
> > I imagine you want CDs to update multiple machines?

Nope.

> Patch CD's are like the "Online Updates" except it reads the updates
> from a CD.  (nice for machines without Internet access) 
> I suspect Adam's question is related to an email earlier today where he
> couldn't get the network running on a laptop.  :-)

Yep, and there are other machines with no connections (for various
reasons) or very limited/slow connections.  Pretty much I've just never
bothered to apply updates to these as (a) how can you hack a
disconnected machine in a locked room or (b) if you really want to try
an SSH attack against a machine with an intermittent 9.6k connection
then have fun!.

> Currently, my update tree for 10.0 is about 3.5GB.

Yikes.

> Too large for a CD, but will fit on a DVD if the laptop has a DVD drive. 

It does;  but other machines don't.  Oh well.

> Otherwise you
> could yank the HDD out of the laptop, install it elsewhere, copy the
> update tree to it, reinstall the HDD and run updates from a dir. (yuck!)

Nope, not gonna happen.  But I suppose you could copy the whole thing to
a USB drive and carry that around.  I've just never tried.

> As for my updates, personally I mirror the updates from a FTP server in
> a nightly cron job and run my own internal FTP server to update all of
> my machines.  That way the updates are only downloaded once.

My checking has showed that if you run HTTP updates via a SQUID proxy
with a really large maximum cacheed object size it is pretty uncommon
for updates to get downloaded more than once.  Although I do understand
what you are doing.

> I also copy my install CD to an ISO image on my hard drive and mount the
> ISO image (loopback) in the FTP server's tree so all my machines can add
> new software without accessing the internet too.  (I set the install
> source to my FTP server).

That it pretty interesting,  I've never tried that.