[wellylug] Odd internet (ip-up?) Problems (was: Problems with fetchmail)

[Simon Blake]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 10:41:10PM +1200, John C Barstow said:
> On Tue, 2004-04-27 at 19:44 +1200, Leslie Boardman wrote:
> > I have toyed with the idea of going to sid but came to the conlcusion
> > (possibly wrong) that it would involve too many downloads (I am on 56k
> > dialup).  Also on the odd occasion that things break in testing I would
> > cop all kinds of trouble from my 'other' who is still getting used to
> > linux.
> 
> I have couple of friends running sid on dialup.  Their apt sources point
> to the security server in case any patches come out for the handful of
> stable packages on their machine.

It's been a few years since I ran a Debian box on dialup, but I used to
track unstable by the simple expedient of leaving dselect running
overnight - if it finished, it started installing, if it didn't, you
could just control-C the download and start it again the next night.  It
won't install any packages till it has everything downloaded, so you're
unlikely to be hosed by a missing dependancy.  It would take a while to
get it up to unstable, but once you were sync'd, it was maybe one night
every ten to download the 10-30MB to keep it in sync (depending on
security advisories, etc).

Cheers
Si