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More snippets from the oft-promised white paper:

This post describes in detail how to mirror content (updates and patches) from Novells update service – update.novell.com.

update.novell.com contains updates for Novell Linux Desktop, Open Enterprise Server and Novell Linux Small Business Suite.

I hope to publish similar articles in the coming days on how to do this for Red Hat Network (for Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and YaST Online Update (for straight SUSE Linux Enterprise Server).


There is a documentation misquote; in the documents it describes jumping through some hoops and placing ZLM6.6 mcookie and partnernet files (these are the credentials for the remote server) on your ZLM server.

No need.

This process should be a lot lot easier with this process.

From your ZLM server (the one where ZLMmirror will run)

rug service-add --type=rce https://update.novell.com/data --key=[key]

[key] is the product activation key you received with your Novell Linux product.

This will create everything needed for zlmmirror to connect to the remote update.novell.com server.

Next step – the xml for the zlmmirror configuration. I recommend creating a zlmmirror-service account for this and giving it full (read/write) access to /Bundles. You can do this from the ZENworks Control Center or from the command line (zlman).

zlman admin-create zlmmirror-service [password]
zlman admin-rights-assign --bundles --create

Hint: Create a ~/.zlmanrc file and place your ZLM username and password in there:

-U [user] -P [password]

Here’s the XML:


update-novell-com.xml

<ZLMMirrorConf>
<Session>
<RemoteServer>
<Base>https://update.novell.com/data</Base>
<Type>RCE</Type>
</RemoteServer>
<LocalServer>
<Type>zlm</Type>
<User>zlmmirror-service</User>
<Password>foo</Password>
</LocalServer>
<Catalog>
<Name>sles9</Name>
<Target>sles-9-i586</Target>
<ExcludeTarget>nld-9-x86_64</ExcludeTarget>
<Folder>update.novell.com</Folder>
</Catalog>
</Session>
</ZLMMirrorConf>

Test the structure with:

zlmmirror cv ./update-novell-com.xml -v

This should come back with a dump of the log file for a success – i.e. the xml parses correctly. Note that the tags are case sensitive.
If there are problems with the config then zlmmirror will report an error.