You can mirror repositories to a test environment instead of the production environment. The test environment can be used with a limited number of client machines before the tested repositories are moved to the production environment. The test environment can be run on the main SMT server.
The testing environment uses the same structure as the production environment, but it is located in the /srv/www/htdocs/repo/testing/ subdirectory.
To mirror a repository to the testing environment, you can use the Staging tab in the YaSTSMT Management module, or the command smt-staging.
To register a client in the testing environment, modify the /etc/suseRegister.conf on the client machine by setting:
register = command=register&namespace=testing
To move the testing environment to the production environment, manually copy or move it using the cp -a or mv command.
You can enable staging
for a repository in the Repositories tab of the SMT Management module or with the smt-repos command. The mirroring happens automatically to repo/full/.
If you have a SLE11-based Update repository with patches, SMT tools can help you with the management. With these tools you can select patches and create a snapshot and copy it into repo/testing/. After tests are finished you can copy the contents of repo/testing into the production area /repo.
SLE10-based Update repositories are not supported by SMT tools. Not all of these repositories support selective staging. In this case you must mirror the complete package.
Recommended work flow:
repo => repo/full, repo/full => repo/testing, repo/testing => repo