[vox-tech] apt-proxy

[Bill Kendrick]

I discovered a great use for the large amount of HD space I have sitting
on my machine upstairs... apt-proxy!


What it does is allow all of my local machines to take advantage of the
100Mbit LAN in the house, when doing apt-get update/upgrades.

All four machines run Woody, so any security updates in the past would
require four separate downloads from various Debian mirrors, all over
the (relatively) slower DSL line.

With this proxy running, I just have all of my systems' /etc/apt/sources.lists
point to one machine, and when one system goes to grab a new DEB from the
Debian mirrors, it gets stored locally for the others to retrieve over the LAN.


A few machines also have Mplayer, Mozilla and some other stuff backported
to Woody, so I'll be setting up apt-proxy 'backends' so that any updates
to those apps will only need to be pull down the DSL line once, rather
than 2 or 3 times. :)

  http://apt-proxy.sourceforge.net/


Debian Woody users can just "apt-get install apt-proxy" on the system you
want everything to be cached on, and then alter your "sources.lists" on
all machines to point to it.  (Don't forget to update your /etc/hosts.allow
if you need to!)


It's already cached about 38MB of stuff that all of these boxes want,
which means I'm only waiting for ONE huge download, rather than 4!

Pretty cool!

-bill!

-- 
bill@newbreedsoftware.com                           Got kids?  Get Tux Paint! 
http://newbreedsoftware.com/bill/       http://newbreedsoftware.com/tuxpaint/

PS - Note: This is different from what Mike Simons did over at Worldcom whe
we were working there.  There, he actually installed a FULL Debian mirror,
which meant even apps that were never installed by any of the various Debian
systems were still available locally, on the LAN.  I believe he just had
a machine pulling full mirror updates on a nightly basis...