Debian Administration

apt-cacher, although I'm not quite happy with it.

Main issues:
* not reliable enough; sometimes requires manual killing of hanging process, (not that often to make this a blocker issue)
* introduces significant delay to 'aptitude update' compared to direct connection to a fast mirror; (does not really matter when your updates are handled by apticron)
* creates problems if DNS name of a mirror resolves to several physical hosts; (at least this was so about a year ago; and I use single-headed mirror since that time).
* makes some apt console output useless (actually, this is a problem of apt) when enabled via sources.list;
* breaks some apt-related stuff (apt-listbugs or 'aptitude changelog', IIRC) if used via Acquire::http::Proxy (to fix the previous issue).

So why do I still use it?
* I liked the idea and did not know about the above issues initially.
* Quite easy to configure.
* Have no time to evaluate other kinds of non-essential component while the currently used one works more or less well (provided you know the pitfalls).

--
...Bye..Dmitry.

I use apt-cacher-ng. Originally I didn't worry about a cache, I've only got three machines and except at upgrade time there didn't seem to be any point. I then started to run a lot more systems in a VM and it started to be a pain waiting for the same debs to arrive over my painfully slow (by civilised standards) ADSL connection.

I considered approx as it's supposed to be easy to use and better than apt-cacher then I spotted apt-cacher-ng which is allegedly better again, so I gave that a try. It was dead easy to set up in Lenny and all was going well with Squeeze client but when I tried a Lenny client it fell over because of the volatile repositories. I then installed the Squeeze version on my Lenny box and it's been fine since. So far the demon has needed restarting once in a month. Not as stable as Apache but better than the original apt-cacher.

--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam