Creating a mirror repository

If you remember, at the beginning of the chapter, we created a local repository with all the Oracle Solaris 11 packages and indexed this repository as being from the solaris publisher. Thus, we have two repositories; the first one refers to the Oracle website using the URI, http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release/, and the second one—which is referred by the URI, http//localhost:9999—is stored on disk (/repo_pool/repoimage/repo). Nonetheless, the publisher is the same: solaris. So, as both have the same contents, one of them is a mirror of the other and can be configured with the steps discussed in the next sections.

Getting ready

To follow this recipe, it's necessary that we have a machine (physical or virtual) running Oracle Solaris 11; we log in to the system as the root user and open a terminal. Access to the Internet is necessary.

How to do it…

We need to set a mirror repository by executing the following commands:

root@solaris11:~# pkg set-publisher -m http://localhost:9999 solaris
root@solaris11:~# pkg publisher
PUBLISHER                   TYPE     STATUS P LOCATION
solaris                     origin   online F http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release/
solaris                     mirror   online F http://localhost:9999/
training                  origin   online F http://localhost:8888/
solarisstudio               origin   online F https://pkg.oracle.com/solarisstudio/release/
Symantec                    origin   online F file:///root/SFHA601/dvd2-sol_x64/sol11_x64/pkgs/VRTSpkgs.p5p/

This output is very interesting because now there are two occurrences of the solaris publisher; the first is the original (origin), which contains the metadata and packages, and the second is the mirror, which contains only the contents of the packages. It is necessary to install a package because Oracle Solaris 11 prefers the mirror to retrieve the contents of the packages, but IPS also downloads the meta information (the publisher's catalog) from the original.

We can remove the URI that points to this mirror by executing the following command:

root@solaris11:~# pkg set-publisher -M http://localhost:9999 solaris
root@solaris11:~# pkg publisher
PUBLISHER                   TYPE     STATUS P LOCATION
solaris                     origin   online F http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release/
solarisstudio               origin   online F https://pkg.oracle.com/solarisstudio/release/
training                    origin   online F http://localhost:8888/

An overview of the recipe

Mirroring repositories is another way to say that if the primary repository is unavailable; there's a second place available to download the packages from. In other words, the same publisher offers its packages from two different locations. Additionally, mirrors offer an alternative to download the package contents without overloading the original repository.