I make good use of RPMforge for my production CentOS systems. I have local repositories for the main CentOS distribution and updates, however, recent automated kickstart installs are starting to hang on downloads from slower RPMforge mirrors. I've tried limiting to specific RPMforge mirrors and also using the yum fastestmirror plugin. I'd like to establish a local RPMforge repository, but don't know if this is a common practice. I'd be interested in mirroring the EL5 and EL6 repositories.
Does anyone here do this in their own environments? How much space should be budgeted for such a mirror? Or is this idea overkill?
Edit:
Some installation-time debugging seems to show that many of the RPMforge mirrors are outdated or inaccessible. I did find some references to mrepo
as a potential solution, though.