Purpose

In certain cases, the cluster cannot access the Internet directly, or having a local repository within the company intranet may be beneficial, e.g., when a site is hosting multiple clusters. This KB article will describe creating a local repository using the head node’s web server when running a Red Hat distribution such as RHEL or Rocky Linux. The same steps will generally work if you want to host a repository on a third-party server, rather than the head node.

NOTE: This is also covered in the Administrator Manual, in the chapter on post-installation software management, in the section titled: Configuring Local Repositories For Linux Distributions, And For The BCM Package Repository, For A Software Image.

Steps

Make packages available

The first step is to create a directory  /var/www/html/ to contain the packages you want to make available. This will use the existing head node web server to provide the files. For example, create /var/www/html/repos:

# mkdir /var/www/html/repos

We now need to put packages into this directory. Two common ways to obtain packages are to copy the installer ISO packages or mirror a remote repository.

Option 1: Copy ISO Packages

To copy the installer ISO packages, mount a copy of the installer ISO locally and copy the packages to the newly created directory. For example:

# mkdir /mnt/iso
# mount bcm-10.0-ubuntu2204.iso /mnt/iso
# cp -r /mnt/iso/data/packages/ /var/www/html/repos/

NOTE: This will copy all the ISO packages to your local head node repository. You can specify a direct path to only copy specific architectures or packages as desired, instead of the broader/mnt/iso/data/packages, e.g., /mnt/iso/data/packages/dist/<rhel|rocky>/version/.

Option 2: Mirror a Remote Repository

1. To mirror a remote repository, createrepo and reposync are suggested (but not officially endorsed) tools. You can install these tools via the dnf package manager:

# dnf check updater; dnf install yum-utils createrepo -y

2. After these packages are installed, you can use the reposync tool to download the remote repository, specifying the --repoid of the repository you want to mirror and the --download_path to your local directory

# reposync --repoid=<remote_repo_id> --download_path=/var/www/html/repos/ --download-metadata --newest-only

3. After the reposync command runs, you must generate the necessary metadata for the local repository using createrepo. This allows clients to install packages from your mirror.

# createrepo /var/www/html/repos/

Add Repo to Clients

You can now create a new repository (for example, local.repo) file in /etc/yum.repos.d on systems where you want to use the new repository.

[local-repo]
name=BCM ISO Repo
baseurl=http://<mirror_server_ip_or_hostname>/repos/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

To use your new repository in software images, connect to the software image chroot with the command cm-chroot-sw-img :

# cm-chroot-sw-img /cm/images/<image name>

Afterward, create a new repository (for example, local.repo) file in /etc/yum.repos.d as well.

Verify ISO

To verify that the newly configured dnf repository is usable, first clean up the dnf cache and run dnf repolist:

# dnf clean all
# dnf repolist
[...]
local-repo                                             BCM ISO Repo
[...]

You should now be able to use your new repository to install packages.