Synchronizing - Red Hat NETWORK SATELLITE 5.3.0 Installation Manual

Chapter 6. Importing and Synchronizing
Note
Importing package data can take up to two hours per channel. You may begin registering
systems to channels as soon as they appear in the RHN Satellite's website. No packages
are necessary for registration, although updates cannot be retrieved from the Satellite until
the channel is completely populated.
You may repeat this step for each channel or include them all within a single command by passing
each channel label preceded by an additional -c flag, like so:
satellite-sync -c channel-label-1 \
-c channel-label-2 \
--mount-point /var/rhn-sat-import
This conducts the following tasks in this order:
1.
Populating the tables describing common features for channels (channel families). This can
also be accomplished individually by passing the --step=channel-families option to
satellite-sync.
2.
Creating a particular channel in the database and importing the metadata describing the channel.
Individually, use the --step=channels option.
3.
Moving the RPM packages from the temporary repository into their final location. Individually, use
the --step=rpms option.
4.
Parsing the header metadata for each package in the channel, uploading the package data, and
associating it with the channel. Individually, use the --step=packages option.
5.
Identifying Errata associated with the packages and including them in the repository. Individually,
use the --step=errata option.
After running the preceding sample command, the population of the channel should be complete. All
of the packages should have been moved out of the repository; this can be verified with the command
cd /var/rhn-sat-import/; ls -alR | grep rpm. If all RPMs have been installed and moved
to their permanent locations, then this count will be zero, and the administrator may safely remove the
temporary repository (in this case, /var/rhn-sat-import/).

6.3. Synchronizing

An update channel is only as useful as the freshness of the information in that channel. Since the RHN
Satellite is designed to be a standalone environment, any update advisories published by RHN must
be manually imported and synchronized by the administrator of the RHN Satellite.
During synchronization over the Internet, the RHN Satellite Synchronization Tool performs the
following steps:
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