JetPatch's Local Patch Repositories Introduction

There are many reasons you may want to create a local patch repository:

• Bandwidth is a major factor as downloading updates from the Internet can be time and bandwidth consuming. 
• Another reason may be that your servers are not connected to the Internet and thus need to get their updates from a local source.
• You may have a development environment that you would prefer to not spend money on licenses for but still need to update.

Whatever your reason, JetPatch supports the use of local patch repositories; the following articles will walk you through the process of setting up your local repository, describing the necessary steps for each OS type and version.  Before you begin, the table in the article 'JetPatch Supported Platforms', covers all the JetPatch supported OSs and versions. Column 'Patch Management Requirement' captures the patch download techniques supported by the OS vendor and JetPatch - if it has a link to a local repository setup instructions, then this OS/version supports a local repository as explained in the article.

Each article also describes the setting-up of a cron job that will automatically sync the local repository on a daily basis (it is possible to change the interval using a different cron schedule) with new patches available on the vendor's global website.  It is important to remember that each local repository requires internet access, in order to communicate with the vendor's global patch repositories and also an interface into the local network, allowing the Endpoints to communicate with it. 

The article called 'Configure Local Repository on all Client Servers' explains how to automatically set-up the Endpoints managed by JetPatch to use the repositories you have just created.  

Finally the article called: 'Secured Local Repository Configuration' provides guidelines on how to make the channel to the repositories (in case of Linux/Nginx based local repositories) secured using SSL.

Note: The Oracle Solaris 10 local repository is a unique case, it is a proprietary local repository developed by JetPatch used for caching Solaris 10 CPUs (Critical Patch Updates), however, it doesn't support automatic patch downloading from Oracle, rather you have to download the patches from Oracle and upload them into the repository - it is all explained in the article.