Maybe it’s because I like to complicate things, but I often end up with multiple servers running the same Linux distro, and they would benefit from running a local mirror. (Both because it would be faster, and because I’d waste less bandwidth from generous mirror maintainers.) But setting up a full mirror often takes terabytes of space, and much of it is stuff I would never use.
For some time I ran squid, as I described on an older blog as Lazy distro mirrors with squid. That box is no longer online, though.
I’ve more recently become aware of Sonatype’s Nexus Repository Manager, or some combination of words like that. I actually learned of it as a Docker cache, but it also supports yum, apt, and more.
Interestingly, it supports both hosted repos, where you build your own packages, and also proxy repos where it’s largely a caching proxy.
I’ve been tempted to set this up locally, and also on a dedicated server so I can point all my boxes at my own “mirror”. Generally open source mirror infrastructure is good, but I have an uncanny knack for somehow ending up with weirdly-slow mirrors.
This seems like a good time to drop a reminder that you can specify multiple baseurl= lines in yum repos if you don’t want to use a mirrorlist (see my above remark about having bad luck) but don’t want to be thrown off if a single mirror goes down.