Yum is currently the most popular package manager for rpm based Linux distributions. For installing or updating, the packages are fetched from repositories spread all over the Internet. In a shared network where a group of people share the same network via a proxy server, all of them downloads the same packages subsequently for updating or installing which results into wastage of bandwidth.

IntelligentMirror can be used to create a mirror of static HTTP content on a local network. When someone downloads a package from Internet, it is stored/cached on a machine on local network and subsequent downloads of that particular package are served from the storage/cache of the local machine. This facilitate the efficient usage of bandwidth and also reduces the average download time.

InstantMirror currently works fine but involves a lot of configuration, is not efficient and not being developed actively. Also current version is not integrable with Yum and can't be used to optimize the package download queues.

I propose to redevelop InstantMirror as IntelligentMirror and a helper package which will communicate with IntelligentMirror and will help it to optimize the download queue depending on several factors like the packages which are requested by the users frequently should have a higher download priority as compared to packages which are rarely requested by the users. IntelligentMirror will also include scripts to manage/transfer cached packages on separate machine on the same network using synchronization tools.

To minimize the configurations involved in using IntelligentMirror, a stripped down version of python based open source proxy server will be shipped with IntelligentMirror. This will facilitate the auto-configuration of IntelligentMirror with minimal user effort. Also, a normal user will be able to skip squid configuration, which may be a tedious task for a newbie.

Detailed proposal : http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/IntelligentMirror