Configuring urpmi-proxy for Mageia7

Not much has been mentioned about urpmi-proxy for Mageia. Indeed, the somewhat cryptic documentation for it appears to have been written around the time of Mageia5 in a breezy, informal style. Once I get it working, I hope to flesh out the documentation here.

In theory, urpmi-proxy works as a local proxy for a Mageia repository. You set it as the source repository for all your machines and it downloads and distributes only what packages you need.

For the most part, little configuration is needed "out of the box". It is configured by default to use the existing repositories that are already configured on the host/server machine but as pointed out, this creates a recursive loop should you update the server itself.

There are other package management systems available from Mageia, notably dnf which will become the standard system only after the Mageia build system, dependent on urpmi, can be translated to dnf. Although untried at this point, it might be possible to update the server using dnf and not encounter a recursive loop.

Installing urpmi-proxy

Simply invoke

$ sudo urpmi urpmi-proxy

And this will also install the apache webserver, which is used to serve the files to your other machines.

Set apache at start every tome and then start it.

$ sudo chkconfig htttpd on
$ sudo service httpd start

Backup the urpmi-proxy config file found at /etc/urpmi-proxy.conf and then, after checking for an appropriate http mirror for you to use from the Mageia Mirrors Database,  modify /etc/urpmi-proxy.conf similarly as follows

$sources = [
        'http://mirror.dacentec.com/mageia/'
 ];

This should configure your urpmi-proxy server. It can now serve files for any release version and architecture that is available from the server you selected from the database.

Configuring the Client Machine

You need to remove the urpmi source already configured for the client machine by invoking

$ sudo urpmi.removemedia -a

And point it at your urpmi-proxy server with

$ sudo urpmi.addmedia --distrib http://your.local.urpmi-proxy-server/mageia/distrib/7.1/x86_64

You can use your urpmi-proxy server to serve any version and any architecture by specifying the appropriate path in the command above.

It SHOULD Work . . .

I set the debug flag on both apache and urpmi-proxy and when I attempt tho install my urpmi-proxy repo on my client machine, I get the following error
   http://192.168.1.5/mageia/distrib/7/x86_64/media/core/release/media_info/20190627-235351-synthesis.hdlist.cz
retrieval of [http://192.168.1.5/mageia/distrib/7/x86_64/media/core/release/media_info/synthesis.hdlist.cz] failed (md5sum mismatch)
problem reading synthesis file of medium "Core Release"

There is a bugfix for this mentioned at bugs.mageia.org, and that fix has been incorporated into the version available in cooker, but it did not help me.

I have a bug report here.

RESOURCES

HOWTO proxy rpm using urpmi-proxy, Mageia Forum

Urpmi-proxy, Mageia Wiki

Urpmi, Mageia Wiki

Mageia mirrors database