It's simple after one knows

I have a small network at home and have been wondering about the easiest way to ensure that the packages and cached updates are easily shared.

I prefer Fedora simply because I am comfortable with it. I have a local repository from the downloaded cd's, have set the Keep Cache option in yum.

NFS seemed the most convenient way to share but mounting these exports at boot time was not viable. The 'server' may not be up. Manual mounting is irritating. Automount is obviously the solution but I had not tried it for years.

Once I realized that the first entry in the sample auto.misc was for an NFS file system, in spite of the server name being 'ftp...', the rest was trivial.

I exported the local repository as a read only file system and the yum cache directory as read-write with no root squash.

I can't recall why I had given up on automount a few years ago. Quite possibly there was no access to google to help me over the minor hurdles.