Using the CentOS Download Cacher R2 for air-gapped environments

You can use the CentOS Download Cacher R2 for air-gapped environments by using the buildRepo subcommand to download all patches for a repository to a specified directory.

Before you begin

  • Ensure you have access to the BigFix supported CentOS base repositories and sub-repositories. To check, run the subcommand check-allrepos.
  • Ensure you have enough space to download the repository metadata and packages. To check for the required storage space, run the subcommand check-storagereq.
  • Increase the BigFix server’s sha1 folder size limit by doing the following steps:
    1. From the BigFix console, right-click the computer and select Edit Computer Setting.
    2. Increase the _BESGather_Download_CacheLimitMB size.

      The suggested size is the current BigFix server’s sha1 folder size plus the size of sha1_download_dir.

      If the size of the sha1_download_dir cannot be determined beforehand the suggested size of the sha1_download_dir is a minimum of 20GB per repository. Note that the minimum size of 20GB might increase over time.

Procedure

  1. Use the buildRepo subcommand with the CentOSR2DownloadCacher.exe file to download all the files for a repository to a specified directory. For example: 
    CentOSR2DownloadCacher.exe --download_dir C:\downloads 
--sha1_download_dir C:\sha1_downloads
buildRepo --key centos-6.8-x64, centos-6.7-x64

    In this example, the download cacher tool downloads the packages to sha1_download_dir and the repository metadata to download_dir for both the "centos-6.8-x64" and "centos-6.7-x64" repositories.

  2. Transfer the download_dir to the air-gapped BigFix server and the sha1 files in sha1_download_dir to the BigFix Server’s sha1 folder.
  3. Open the configuration file of the CentOS Download Cacher R2 called plugin.ini. Configure the plugin.ini file with the following settings to set the BigFix Server to retrieve the repository metadata and required packages from the local cache instead of trying to retrieve them online. 
    localCache = <download_directory_specified_for_the_--download_dir_parameter>
localCacheOnly = yes