Re: sources.list

["Matthew H. Ray" <slack@linuxfreak.com>]

Duane Powers wrote:
> 
> I have a question - I have a dozen boxen that I am maintaining, all with
> Debian ( almost all potato - one woody) I would like to save bandwidth
> and centralize administration by utilizing one of the boxes as a apt-get
> source. then I can apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade ; done, on one
> box, and save all the .deb's then use those .deb's for the other boxen
> without actually mirroring the whole debian site.
> 
> I know it's configurable - I don't know how.
> I read the man for sources.list, but I don't know how to set up the
> webserver to understand the following;

I have a very similiar setup at work.  There's a debian package called
mirror (apt-get install mirror) that comes with examples that can be
used to mirror a Debian mirror (tweak to exclude what you don't need (in
my case everything but i386).  Install it on a box that has a couple of
gigs of HD space for setting up your private mirror.  Then setup
anonymous FTP on the mirror box.  Once you have your server mirroring
properly, you simply insert the lines into your sources.list of each of
your boxen.  Here's mine.

deb ftp://internal_mirror potato main contrib non-free
deb ftp://internal_mirror dists/proposed-updates/
deb http://non-us.debian.org potato/non-US main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org potato/updates main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.twoguys.org/debian potato main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.twoguys.org/debian dists/proposed-updates/

If something isn't on the internal mirror, it pulls it off of the
external mirror.  Add the mirror call into your crontab (mine updates
nightly at 3 am).

-- 
Matt Ray
slack@linuxfreak.com