[vox] apt-get via torrent?

[Ken Bloom]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 03:56:15PM -0800, Sameer Verma wrote:
> Hi all,
> This semester, I taught my "Managing Open Source" class in a lab where
> we had a dozen Linux boxes (dual booted Windows XP/Ubuntu Hoary
> Hedgehog) for my students to work on.  Each student installed the distro
> herself (himself) and learned a good bit about partitions, distros, etc.
> They also occasionally used Synaptic to upgrade the distro and keep it
> updated.
> 
> Now that the semester is coming to an end, I've started thinking about
> ways in which it would be easier to upgrade the whole lab and still keep
> distros fully installed (as opposed to some terminal server magic) so
> that students can do things with it (i.e. log in as root or sudo over to
> see how things work). Instead of having 12 machines apt-get via Synaptic
> every few days, why not get one machine updated and then use torrent to
> do the same for the rest?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Surely there's no need for
bittorrent within the lab -- apt-proxy should work fine if the goal is
to keep all of your useful packages locally so you don't need to tie
up your outgoing internet connection with 12 upgrades.

You should also look at how to preseed debconf so it doesn't ask the
same questions when you upgrade every machine.

If you're looking for system imaging tools (so that you can just copy
all of the machine's partitions across the network), that's a whole
different ball game, but it should have nothing to do with bittorrent
protocols.

> So that got me thinking...Is it possible to run Synaptic (or apt-get)
> via torrent instead of via http or ftp?

Take a look at apt-torrent (http://sianka.free.fr/).

> BTW, the class did install OpenOffice.org 2.0.0 on Windows XP using
> bittorrent. They first got OOo 2.0.0 on one machine and then ran
> torrents to get it distributed to other machines in the lab. It was a
> fun exercise to see the torrent pieces coming from across the desk!

--Ken Bloom

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