Re: Which package cacher to use?
Rogério Brito wrote:
So, I would like to ask you:
* what is the package chacher that you are using?
Squid
* Is it able to cope with multiple architectures?
Yes
* Can it support multiple distributions? Supporting Debian, Ubuntu and
other non-official repositories would be really handy.
Yes
* Does it keep a directory hierarchy neatly organized like the Debian
archive?
N/A
The article lists two issues with Squid (or other general purpose proxies).
One is that it doesn't recognise identical files from different
repositories - which is fair enough criticism, although most users don't
use APT's built in redundancy by listing multiple repositories with the
same content, so most users won't be penalised by this that often. And
then only when the archive they actually used is down (one could
configure Squid to deliver the package if a 304 failed if your preferred
mirror is unreliable).
The other criticism that other web traffic will expire packages from
cache is not really a problem at all. You could either dedicate a squid
to repositories, when the issue reduces to just how efficient the
resource usage of the different caches are, or more sensibly accept this
will happen if the cache is small and give your squid instance as much
disk space as it needs to maximize the byte (&time) savings. Last I
looked Terabyte drives were very cheap, and the entire Debian archive is
currently ~335GB (including a load of DVD and similar images), which
leaves plenty of disk space free for caching other stuff like Ubuntu,
websites etc. Indeed most small organisations only need a few gigabytes
of squid cache for regular web traffic.
Other than some tweaking to ensure Squid is caching large enough files,
it is largely an install and forget job. I'd suggest making Squid
transparent, in the years we've been using it as a web proxy I've hit
one website that didn't work with Squid correctly (due to an obscure
HTTP bug in Firefox), and keep meaning to make it transparent, but in
our environment this is more complex than most.
You might want to tweak the Squid behaviour for deb files slightly,
there is some advice around, but one can over micromanage such details.
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