Erik Steffl wrote:
I have two computers at home with dial-up internet access. I have debian installed on one of them and will install debian on the other one. They will use lot of same packages (but not exactly the same ones). Is it possible to use one of them as sort of apt-get cache so that the common packages are downloaded only once? The way I see it is: one computer works as it used to, the other one is set so that it first tries to get package from the first one, if it's not there only then it goes out to the 'net and downloads that package... or something like that...
A very simple way to do this is to install squid on your existing machine and change your /etc/apt/apt.conf to do all HTTP requests through your proxy. (man apt.conf)
Your new machine should use the proxy as well. Notes: 1) Make sure all (or most of) your 'deb' lines use the HTTP protocol.2) Make sure you configure squid to cache large files. (By default it doesn't!!!)
If you want, you can setup a cron job to do a nightly 'apt-get update;apt-get -d -y dist-upgrade' on one of the machines so that you can do quick upgrades during the day.
There are probably other ways to do this... This setup is what we used at work and worked fine for us.
also, does it make sense to share some parts of distro? I can see that I wouldn't want to share /etc but what about /usr?
"Can of worms"... Disk space is cheap (at least they are here...) and sharing system files will probably get you mostly in trouble. AFAIK, the only system tree you can safely share is /usr/share/doc.
(Please correct me if I'm wrong here!)
erik
-- Andrew Scherpbier