Re: How to mirror Debian across a firewall
"Pedro Sanchez" <psanchez@nortelnetworks.com> writes:
> I want to have a local Debian mirror but to do this I have to go through
> our firewall. I'm looking at "rsync" and "mirror." The documentation of
> the former doesn't mention proxies at all and that of the latter
> suggests defining the variables proxy=true, proxy_ftp_port=xxxx and
> proxy_gateway=gateway_name. However I've been unable to get mirror
> through the firewall here.
>
> The environment variable ftp_proxy and http_proxy work with other
> packages like lynx and apt but neither rsync or mirror seem to care
> about them.
>
> I'd appreciate any suggestions.
Are you planning on mirroring all the debian distributions (slink,
potato, sid) for every architecture, eg., alpha, sparc, i386, etc.? If
so then, once you figure out your ftp proxy, it'll work fine. If, on
the other hand, you're going to try and mirror only one distribution,
and only one architecture within that distribution your going to be in
for a wild ride trying to do it with ftp!
Most of the Debian mirrors use the proftpd server and it refuses to
flatten symlinks. This is a problem, for example, if you want the
potato distribution, because there are quite a few packages in potato
that are merely symlinks to packages in slink. If you were just doing
slink (don't know about sid) this wouldn't be a problem, but for
potato it's a headache.
Anyway, I gave up on the ftp solution and just started using
w3mir. Other than a small bug that causes files with a "+" in their
names to always be deleted it works fine and there aren't symlinks, at
least visible ones, on the http mirrors, so it's easy to get all the
files needed for a particular architecture in a particular
distribution. It also has handled our http proxy without a hitch. A
simple command-line argument was all that was needed.
I think it's a bit more inefficient than an ftp mirror, but for
partial mirrors it's about the only solution.
Good luck,
Gary
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