Re: how to avoid download during debian installation.

[David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com>]

On 05/11/13 01:22, Muhammad Yousuf Khan wrote:
> is there anything i
> can do to avoid wasting time and manage something locally so that instead
> of wasting precious bandwidth i could point it to the local resource and
> thing can be up to date as needed.

I set up an Approx server for my SOHO LAN:

    http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/approx

It feeds i386 and amd64 boxes running Squeeze and Wheezy.
I built it with a ~7 GB /var partition that is nearly full, so you might 
want to go with something larger.

Here is the Approx configuration file on the server:

    2013-05-11 12:31:19 dpchrist@approx ~
    $ cat /etc/approx/approx.conf | grep -v '#' | grep .
    debian           http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian
    debian-backports http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports
    security         http://security.debian.org/debian-security
    virtualbox       http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox

Here is the Apt configuration file on a Squeeze i386 client:

    2013-05-11 12:32:30 dpchrist@desktop ~
    $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list | grep -v '#' | grep .
    deb http://approx:9999/debian/ squeeze main
    deb-src http://approx:9999/debian/ squeeze main
    deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main
    deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main
    deb http://approx:9999/debian/ squeeze-updates main
    deb-src http://approx:9999/debian/ squeeze-updates main

When building a fresh client, at the screen where it asks you for a 
network mirror, scroll to the top, select "manual" (or whatever it's 
called), and enter "approx:9999" for the server.

HTH,

David