Re: hamm

["James R. Van Zandt" <jrv@vanzandt.mv.com>]

>> I maintain a hamm mirror at work.  According to my records, the
>> traffic to keep hamm up to date amounts to about 20 MB/day.

>I'm a bit of a newbie with respect to Debian, and I've recently susbcribed
>to some mailing lists. I'm still reading a lot of FAQ material, but since
>I saw this thread I couldn't resist to ask: what's the recommended way
>(program) to keep an updated unstable distribution for a home user?

I don't know of any easy way.

That 20 MB/day includes some of the files from Incoming (including the
ones with "14" in their names, so I get early copies of the
installation disks) -- your traffic could be less.

I actually maintain three mirrors.  The first is a conventional one at
work (updated using "mirror" run from a cron job).  The second is a
set of 11 zip disks.  The third is at home.  

Each zip disk has a mirror control file at the root with a name like
"load3".  I pop the disk into the zip drive and execute a command like

   mount /zip; mirror /zip/load*; umount /zip

Then I insert the next disk, type <up><enter> to re-execute the same
command, and repeat until all the disks are updated.

Each disk also has a mirror control file named something like
"dump3".  When I get home, I run

   mount /zip; mirror /zip/dump*; umount /zip

for each disk to update the home mirror.

A second way to transfer the updates is to parse the mirror log file
and extract the names of the files and symlinks downloaded, and tar up
just those files.  Parse the log a second time and extract the names
of the deleted files.  One of these "incremental" updates should fit
on a single zip disk, provided you update at least every two or three
days.

>However, 20Mb/day is not that manageable for me. Since I intend to help
>testing the base system of unstable Debian, what directories would you
>suggest to mirror, in order to get a decent updated 'base system'?

You can help debug the install disks if you keep current copies of
just these files from  hamm/hamm/disks-i386/current/:

	base2_0.tgz
	drv1440.bin
	install.bat
	linux
	loadlin.exe
	resc1440.bin
	root.bin

Beyond that, you will have to make your own choices.  You could
eliminate some traffic by skipping some sections, like hamradio, tex,
and x11.

                              - Jim Van Zandt


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