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

  1. How can I build an archive structure from the contents of Sarge CDs
  2. 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

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