On Sat, Mar 04, 2006 at 12:36:39AM -0500, Mark Fletcher wrote:
I have all the packages downloaded in my /var/cache/apt/archives
directory. I don't want the notebook to have to download them all
again
[...]
After reading the man pages on apt, apt.conf, aptitude etc, and googling
around, here's what I am thinking of doing. First of all, exposing my
desktop's /var/cache/apt/archives as an NFS mount, configuring my
gateway's firewall to prevent anyone mounting it from outside my LAN.
You don't need a firewall to do this; /etc/exports suffices. This
should be perfectly safe so long as you don't use both machines to
apt-get at the same time. If you do, though, one apt-get could try to
resume downloading a file currently downloading in another apt-get, with
unpredictable results. You could mess around with locking, but there
are several robust solutions readily available. Look into the packages
apt-cacher apt-proxy and approx.
Mounting this NFS mount on the laptop, let's say at /mnt/aptarchive.
Then, setting APT config option Dir::Cache::archives on the notebook
to point at /mnt/aptarchive
If you use NFS, you should just mount directly to
/var/cache/apt/archives. That way, having the NFS server down will not
tell apt to put files in /mnt.