How manage a partial mirror with low bandwidth
Posted by moya on Wed 23 Mar 2005 at 03:56
I administer the lab for a research team. We all use Debian. Although I'd been network administrator for some time, I've never faced the problem of maintaining several Debian workstation (nice that all WS are identical). The first thing I did was to copy every CD of Sarge into a directory in the server and export it via http. Then I setup each workstation to update against this repository.
I also symlinked the /var/cache/apt/archives inside the exported dir. Nevertheless, that's the ugly way.
I'd like to build an archive from the contents of CDs, then update it, but I only have 150 MB/month and only http navigation. So, I would welcome advice on
- How can I build an archive structure from the contents of Sarge CDs
- How can I partially update that archive if I only have an http access to the internet
I welcome too suggestion of 'by-hand management'
Regards, maykel
http://packages.debian.org/stable/admin/apt-proxy
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I had sarge/sarge-i386-disc{1,2,3 ...}. Then invoked apt-proxy -r -i sarge and failed.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
You may need to temporarily copy all the debs from each Sarge CD ... something like this:
mkdir /tmp/debs
cp `find /cdrom|egrep '\.deb'` /tmp/debs
apt-proxy-import /tmp/debs
That's untested, but is basically what I did.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
I do installations and maintenance of POS (points of sale), using linux. Here, ppl still using redhat9 (because is simpler to install, comercial, etc) now i want to change it to debian, and it's very annoying to carry 14 CDs of Sarge for each installation..... i got a server, but i'm not sure about the commands i must do in order to create that repository from CDs... and it would be very usefull :D
if one of you already done that.. it would save me a lot of time.. and brain storm, perhaps :D
thx in advanced!
Nuno Leitao
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
#mkdir /tmp/debs
#cp `find /cdrom|egrep '\.deb'` /tmp/debs
#apt-proxy-import /tmp/debs
or
#apt-proxy-import -r -i /cdrom
but for every deb-file in directory i've got a message (in both cases):
<deb-file-name> skipped - no suitable backend found
What's wrong? How can i solve this?
Thank you.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
That sounds like you haven't got apt-proxy setup properly yet. You need to configure it so that it talks to at least one backend repository.
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I'm trying to setup local apt mirror for use with dfsbuild and debootstrap, because these programs want to download packets from internet, but i don't want them to do it, cause i have 2 debian DVDs. Is it possible to make local mirror of these DVDs?
Thank you.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
I've never tried to make items never use the 'net, I've only ever used the DVDs or CDs as a way to pre-populate an apt-proxy cache.
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