Mirrors

["Stephen A. Witt" <sawitt@electra.fu.hac.com>]

I'm mirroring the binary-i386 portion of the Debian distribution on a
machine at work because my company (actually huge corporate entity) has a
firewall, naturally.  Moreover, this firewall has some very non-standard
proxies that I have not been able to get to work with the apt method of
dselect.  My mirror machine has a modem and that gives me normal access to
the Internet (though very slow), but at least I have a machine within the
company intranet that has a Debian distribution that I can use to support
my other machines.

My question has to do with the naming of directories in the Debian
distribution.  I've been mirroring 'stable' now for a while --
main/binary-all, main/binary-i386, contrib/binary-all,
contrib/binary-i386, and non-free/binary-all, non-free/binary-i386.  Now I
decided to start mirroring 'unstable', with the same portions of the
distribution as above.  But I'm running into problems because 'stable' and
'unstable' are soft links to 'hamm' and 'slink' I guess and in
unstable/main/binary-all/<something> there are links to
hamm/main/binary-all/<something> instead of to
stable/main/binary-all/<something>.  When mirror tries to link the files
it fails on my system because I don't have a hamm directory, only stable.  
So this seems to mean that I must not use 'stable' and 'unstable', but
'hamm' and 'slink'.

So I guess if I want to mirror only part of the distribution (binary-all
and binary-i386) I need to manually add the soft links between the code
name of the distribution (e.g. slink) and the canonical name of the
distribution (e.g. unstable).  I was trying to stay away from the code
names and use only the canonical names.  Is this right?