[wellylug] updating vs bandwidth

[David Antliff]

On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 08:31, Jeff Hunt <jeffhunt90 at gmail.com> wrote:
> To David, what is involved in creating an apt-cacher server. Is this
> easier than setting up ssh and doing a cli ssh copy as i do?

I've been through all this exercise several times in the last ten
years with Debian, Ubuntu and even something similar with Gentoo once.
I've written rsync scripts, messed around with my own apt proxy, and
believe me, apt-cacher is *the* way to go.

Installing it is easy - just apt-get install apt-cacher (or
apt-cacher-ng although I haven't tried that yet) and a server is set
up for you, all ready-to-go. There may be some minor configuration to
do but I can't think what it would be - perhaps the package storage
location...

For all your machines that want to share packages, just edit their
apt/sources.list file such that:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main restricted

becomes

deb http://your-apt-cacher-server/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy
main restricted

etc.

It's really easy to use, and even the machine running apt-cacher can
use its own server.

Using rsync to move packages between machines does work, but it's a
bit of a nuisance when you have different sets of packages between
machines. Apt-cacher simply catches all packages and holds onto them -
you only ever download each package once. There are also options to
clean up the archive and remove obsolete packages, although I don't
bother with that (disk space is cheap).

Give apt-cacher a try, seriously :)

-- David.