Debian Administration

Hi,

you could try apt-proxy. It is quite simple to install and configure.
You just need to change your /etc/apt/sources.list on client, to point to the apt-proxy machine, and it's done :)

approx is your friend... well, this is my friend for a few monthes now. Having a full Debian mirror is not considered to be a good idea as you certainly don't need 95% of the packages; a caching proxy is good enough.

Hello.
I have a bunch of debian machines and i keep my local debian mirror with apt-proxy and apt-move.

although my question is do you have any deb package of your own and do you want to put them in your local deb mirror. if so try using apt-ftparchive to build your local deb mirror properly

Try debmirror. An example of it can be seen here

There is brief discussion of creating a mirror with debmirror here.

Steve
--

Hi cpankonien! I use apt-proxy, it's a very good tool if you don't need the full >6GB for one cpu-arch. I use it since 2003 and it's doing a great job. All you need to do is

apt-get install apt-get install apt-proxy

and tune the config a little bit. My '/etc/apt-proxy/apt-proxy-v2.conf' (without comments):

[DEFAULT]
address = 192.168.0.187
port = 9999
min_refresh_delay = 1h
complete_clientless_downloads = 1
debug = all:4 db:0
timeout = 15
cache_dir = /home/aptproxy
cleanup_freq = 1d
max_age = 120d
max_versions = 1

[debian]
backends =
        http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian
        http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian
        http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian
        ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian

[debian-non-US]
backends =
        http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-non-US
        http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian-non-US
        ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian

[security]
backends =
        http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian-security
        http://security.debian.org/debian-security

You can add or remove some servers. I'm from germany so I use the fpt2.de.* mirrors. An Important entry is the security entry, becaus it mirrors the security patches too. The 'adress' entry at the beginning is the apt-proxy ip-adress. Know my '/etc/apt/sources.list':

deb http://192.168.0.187:9999/debian/ sarge main non-free contrib
deb-src http://192.168.0.187:9999/debian/ sarge main non-free contrib
deb http://192.168.0.187:9999/security sarge/updates main contrib non-free

Thats all. Now make

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

and everything looks like before, but if you make updates on more than just one machine, than you can see the ghosts of debian and apt working.

*Bad english, I know*

I found apt-mirror to work perfectly.
Following this guide. http://www.interparse.com/debianmirror/
Perhaps you could post what error you get, and I'll be able to help.

Try building a Partial Debian GNU/Linux Mirror using apt-move etc.

I'm using apt-mirror for creating/updating my local mirror which is used for our university, campus, and local scientific institutes. No problems were experienced either.

Please explain the problem you got with apt-mirror.

You also can get help on official forum: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=197335

I made a "mirror" by using Squid.

Change the settings of Squid to use a big cache size, change the maximum file size to keep (to be sure the big packages are kept) and be sure that Squid hold the packages long enough.

Of course, use everywhere the same repository and the download is at the same speed as the LAN speed!!!


linox.be

Thanks to all for suggestions and help, I've tried a few (apt-proxy, approx) to no avail, but then I haven't been able to spend a whole lot of time on this project. I decided to give apt-mirror another shot and am making progress, I am in contact with Dmitry, the guy who wrote it so hopefully that will bear fruit. The reason I want to try apt-mirror is that while apt-proxy seems a good solution, I would like to have the whole distro locally at all times as I tend to try a lot of different server build configs, and if I understand correctly, apt-proxy will only get a particular package if requested by the client. While my bandwidth is good enough for that to not be a problem, I'd rather have the whole dist available, and have it update at a convenient time in the early am. If I misunderstand, please feel free to correct me. Once again, thanks to all, really glad I switched to Debian!

Success with apt-mirror! Turns out all my problems were caused by errors in mirror.list and set defaultarch (should read "set defaultarch i386") in /etc/apt/mirror.list. Lots of blinky lights now, i suspect it will be downloading for quite a while, looks like around 18 gb as i only did stable main, may add more later. Also had to add two more drives to have enough space, luckily I had a few laying around. (Also the first time I've done lvm in debian...used it quite a bit in suse but pretty similar.) Once again, thanks to all!