New on the Zend Developer Zone today is an article from Shahar Evron about mirroring Zend Server repositories to re-serve them out, either to a different community or as a part of your internal processes.

There are several good reasons to mirror a Linux repository, be it the Zend repositories or any other repository. The most simple reason is sheer performance: if you need to install Zend Server on a number of machines, you can save a lot of valuable time by creating a local mirror of the repositories, and using that mirror as your installation source for all servers.

He also points out that it can save on bandwidth used - pulling from local will always be more efficient. It also gives you more control about exactly what software is installed on your servers. He breaks the mirroring process up into four steps (with a few added helpful hints at the end):

• Copy the Zend Server repository to a local machine
• Local Repository Test
• Enable network access to your local repository
• Configure clients to use your local repository