Debian mirror of i386 only.
For some time I've had a partial mirror of debian. Partial being the
slink distribution and only the binary-i386 directories. It's worked
well and greatly eased upgrading the machines I have Debian installed
on. Recently I decided to start mirroring potato instead of slink. I
thought it would be easy but I thought wrong. Apparently something has
changed and I can no longer "flatten" symbolic links with the mirror
utility. After some investigation this seems to be a "feature" of a
lot of new ftp daemons, in particluar proftpd that a lot of the Debian
mirror sites seem to favor.
Further investigation showed that even my mirror of slink was not
being updated properly. So this has been going on for some time, I
just never looked to see if my mirror was being updated. It wasn't.
I thought I could get around the problem by going ahead and mirroring
the binary-i386 and binary-all portions of potato. Unfortunately,
there's a lot in potato that merely links to slink and I definately
don't have the space to mirror potato and slink.
The question is has anyone gotten around this problem. It's quite easy
to show. Simply log in via an ftp client to one of the mirrors and do:
cd /debian/dists/potato/main/binary-i386/admin
ls -lRatL
The "L" flag is supposed to "flatten" symbolic links. Unfortunately,
under proftpd it doesn't.
Also, I don't seem to be the only one having this problem. One of the
mirror sites listed on the debian mirros page only mirrors the i386
distribution and looking at their site I noticed that none of the
files that are actually symlinks in potato are there. You can verify
this for yourself by looking at:
ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/debian/potato/main/binary-i386/admin
You'll note that several files are missing from the admin section. In
particular debconf_0.2.xx.deb. On the major mirros this file is
actually a symbolic link to somewhere else.
Any ideas appreciated.
Thanks,
Gary Hennigan
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