RepoForge FAQ

What is RepoForge?

The RepoForge project maintains RPM packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Scientific Linux. It provides a set of repositories compatible with various RHEL-derived distributions.

How do I use RepoForge?

See Using RepoForge

How can I contribute?

There are numerous ways you can help. Feel free to do more than one!

Promote RepoForge - let people know when it helped you solve a problem
Get active on our mailinglists
Test the various packages in the repos, and let the package maintainers know about any problems you find
Become a packager by fixing packages or adding new packages
Get forking. Fork the repository you want to assist with, fix things, submit pull requests: for example, for the package that is this website
Become a mirror! You can setup a mirror of RepoForge - more details on that below

Why are there now several repositories? What is “rfx”?

Our goal is to move all packages that conflict with upstream packages into a separate “extras” repository; this way, users who want to be confident that our packages will not cause conflicts with upstream can enable the base repository, and users who want newer versions of packages (and are willing to tolerate some package conflicts) can enable the extras repository.

How to become a mirror for RepoForge?

Mirror Requirements

We have a few requirements for those wishing to run a mirror:

You must subscribe to the mailing list for mirror maintainers
At least 140 GB of available disk space. The current distribution directory is around 90 GB, but we wish to leave room for considerable expansion
You must not trim or abridge the mirrored tree in any way
You must not modify the mirrored tree in any way. In particular, index.html, HEADER.html and README.html files must not be altered or removed
Your mirror must not be shown “inside” another site using, for instance, frames
You must do an update-check at least once a day, and preferably four times a day
Do not rsync more rapidly than every hour
Sync on a random minute so it is more likely the requests will be spaced out with other mirrors
You must use ‘repoforge’ name for the mirror

Mirroring techniques

We only support rsync for updating mirrors. You can find details on rsync at http://rsync.samba.org/. Update your mirror with:

/usr/bin/rsync -vai4CH --safe-links --delay-updates --delete rsync://a_Tier1_repoforge_mirror/repoforge/ /path/to/local/mirror/repoforge

We highly recommend the use of a lock file in your cron script, so that you do not spawn multiple connections, which is hard on our servers and on your mirror. Update your mirror with:

/usr/bin/flock -w 60 /var/lock/EUAK1qEPB3SM /usr/bin/rsync -vai4CH --safe-links --delay-updates --delete rsync://a_Tier1_repoforge_mirror/repoforge/ /path/to/local/mirror/repoforge

Create your unique lockfile with:

cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc '[:alnum:]' | head -c12; echo

After I setup a mirror, what next?

You will need to inform us of your new mirror. Once the site is configured, tested, and updating consistently, you should subscribe to the mirror maintainers mailing list.

Provide us with details of your mirror:

URL of mirror
Supported access methods (http, ftp, rsync, …)
Country / state / city where the mirror is located
Contact email address
Update frequency
Approximate bandwidth
The name of Tier1 mirror you are syncing from, which should be one of these:
- Asia:
  
  ftp.riken.jp (Japan) - rsync://ftp.riken.jp/repoforge/
- Europe:
  
  mirror1.hs-esslingen.de (Germany) - rsync://mirror1.hs-esslingen.de/repoforge/
  
  repository.it4i.cz (Czech Republic) - rsync://repository.it4i.cz/repoforge/
- North-America / South-America:
  
  repoforge.eecs.wsu.edu (United States) - rsync://repoforge.eecs.wsu.edu/repoforge/

Notes:

If/when your mirror is on the list, you can change the IP of the mirror without notifying us
If the best contact point for your mirror is not the address you are subscribed to the mailing list with, please provide the email address of your preferred contact as well
Please alert the mailing list if anything about the server changes like location, available bandwidth, frequency of updates, etc.

Why is this FAQ so short?

Because you have yet to fork it on GitHub to add other questions/answers.