RHEL 5.x as a yum server for RHEL 6.x
 

Hi,

I am trying to make a RHEL5.x server work as the Yum repository sever for my dc with RHEL6.x. There are some rpm inconsistencies due to which the metadata for rhel6 rpm's cannot be extracted by rhel6 . I was hoping if somebody had a workaround to this as i don't want to (cannot actually due to business needs) upgrade my rhel5 server and yes i want this server only as my yum server.

Please help out if somebody has any suggestions regarding this .

What inconsistencies? Please shed more light on the exact issue for everybody to get the idea.

On a different note, I have this link in my bookmarks using which I created a local yum repo successfully. May be of some help :-



Regards.

This is what we have on the RHEL site

"Because RPM packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 are compressed using the XZ lossless data compression format, and may also be signed using alternative (and stronger) hash algorithms such as SHA-256, it is not possible to run createrepo on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to create the package metadata for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 packages. The createrepo command relies on rpm to open and inspect the packages, and rpm on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is not able to open the improved Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 RPM package format."

I was basically thinking that if I could get the metadata generated on an RHEL6 server and then find a way to import that back to my rhel5 server and still make it work as the YUM server for the rest of the servers in my DC , not sure if that will work though ...

If it is physical machine,is it possible you to create a virtual machine inside RHEL 5. Install RHEL 6 in virtual machine.

All these are virtual machines and i cannot create any further virtual machines on them .

As the text from RH says, you'll need another system somewhere, either a VM or a spare box, just for this.
What you can do is then nfs share the v6 repos to the current box, so the other systems can't tell the difference :)

The other option of course is RH Satellite (aka Spacewalk for the free version) which allows you to provide 'repos' for any RHEL5 & 6 and extras like customised channels for each 'client' system.
Effectively a local copy of RHN-in-a-box.

Yes .. that sounds like a good idea ..