Re: Mirrors

[glhenni@cs.sandia.gov (Gary L. Hennigan)]

"Stephen A. Witt" <sawitt@electra.fu.hac.com> writes:
| 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?

I'm only mirroring hamm, but I think the best way to do it is to copy
the structure on the Debian ftp site. They have stable and unstable as
soft links to hamm and slink, respectively. So what I do is:

% ls -l <local mirror directory>/debian/dists
drwxr-xr-x   6 glhenni  user       512 Oct 22 01:52 hamm/
drwxr-xr-x   2 glhenni  user       512 Oct 22 13:35 slink/
lrwxr-xr-x   1 glhenni  user         4 Sep 24 13:31 stable -> hamm/
lrwxr-xr-x   1 glhenni  user         5 Sep 21 14:49 unstable -> slink/

and I actually mirror the named directory, in this case "hamm". I
manually created the "stable" and "unstable" soft links so that
dselect and apt would work properly. Note, again, that even though I
have a "slink/unstable" pair I'm not really mirroring them, yet. So
the relevant part of my mirror config file looks like:

package=Debian-hamm
  passive_ftp=0
  remote_dir=/debian/dists/hamm
  local_dir=<local mirror directory>/debian/dists/hamm
  exclude_patt=.*\/binary-alpha\/.*|&
               .*\/binary-m68k\/.*|&
               .*\/binary-powerpc\/.*|&
               .*\/binary-sparc\/.*|&
               .*\/disks-alpha\/.*|&
               .*\/disks-m68k\/.*|&
               .*\/disks-sparc\/.*|&
               .*\/source\/.*

Of course having to manually create the soft links isn't exactly
elegant but that's the price I pay for not mirroring the entire Debian 
site.

Gary