[pca] multi-system download concurrency

[Rajiv Gunja]

Dani,
I was in the same situation, but once your PCA Proxy server has been setup,
you are free to run as many number of pca processes in parallel as your
server can handle. Here is the way I handle in the same situation.

-- Create 2 wrapper scripts, first one to call the second. First one would
run through the server list for which you need the patch bundle created and
the second one would actually run the "pca" command to get your patches in a
tar file. So sending the second script to background, the first script can
call many instances of the first script. Since you are running all this on
the PCA Proxy server, it would take about 4 minutes per server for the tar
ball to be ready.

-GGR

--
Rajiv G Gunja
Blog: http://ossrocks.blogspot.com


2008/10/30 Dani Calloway <dani.calloway at gmail.com>

> I wish to use PCA to cache patches for a large number of (not
> necessarily homogeneous) systems at once, all of which are behind a
> firewall which does not allow access to the "outside".  So I currently
> use PCA's excellent --from-file feature and run the --download one
> system at a time.
>
> I've noticed that there is a lot of idle time spent waiting on
> SunSolve, or establishing connections, and so on. So doing each system
> in sequence becomes a real time-waster. However, I can't use the
> --threads feature of PCA since each system will require its own
> invocation with a different --from-files argument.
>
> So, the question is whether PCA is threadsafe. That is, can I fork off
> four or five or ten instances at once without worrying that the patch
> downloads will become corrupted, should more than one instance of PCA
> attempt to download the same file at the same time?
>
> Also, somewhat unrelated, should a patch become corrupt, is there a
> mechanism for detecting that (GPG signature or SHA1 or similar)?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> --
> Dani Calloway
>
>
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