Re: Installing Stretch/Testing with absolute minimal bandwith useage
On 06/13/2017 09:41 AM, Darac Marjal wrote:
On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 09:20:43AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
I am running Stretch that was fully updated/upgraded less than a week
ago. I have the flash drive used to do the original install of
Stretch. I have not _intentionally_ purged any files from cache.
I wish to install Stretch on two additional machines. I am near my
internet data cap and wish to make *ABSOLUTE MINIMAL* usage of
available bandwidth.
The purpose of this is to test the _installation process_ itself.
That eliminates anything resembling cloning. A secondary benefit
will be learning more about how Debian does things.
Suggestions?
I have not tried any of this, but this would be my plan of attack for
your solution.
I had no real idea of where to start or a tentative path to follow.
I've skimmed the links you gave. I suspect that site is a guide to
things I've been looking for.
The installer pulls its packages from another server. Normally that
server is somewhere out on the internet, but to save on transfer
costs, what if that server was inside your LAN. We also need a way
to tell that server that you already have some *.deb files and you'd
like to use those, rather than a solution which involves mirroring
a full Debian archive.
Apt-Cacher-NG appears to solve this. Firstly, you intall it on the
"installed" computer (this may incur transfer costs).
It was minimal. When I used Synaptic's search function it brought up
other packages whose descriptions looked interesting. Downloading all
was < 5MB.
Secondly, you
start apt-cacher-ng running (it appears[1] to need minimal
configuration). Thirdly, you import your already downloaded files[2]
(you'll find apt's cache at /var/cache/apt/archive/*.deb).
My hope had been to copy those somewhere to that would be available
locally without a need for a LAN. That may not be feasible.
Finally,
during installation, tell the installer to use apt-cacher-ng as
a proxy
(http://IP-OR-NAME.OF.INSTALLED.COMPUTER:3142/).
What should happen is that apt-cacher-ng receives a request "GET
blah_123.deb". If it finds a copy of the file in it's cache, it serves
that from disk. Otherwise it downloads the file from upstream (this
will incur transfer costs) AND stores it to disk. The next time any
computer requests "blah_123.deb", apt-cacher-ng will be able to
serve it locally, instead of having to download it again.
As I say, I've not used apt-cacher-ng myself, but from the
documentation, it looks like it'll work.
My mantra recently is "If retirement isn't for learning, what use is it?"
[1]
https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~bloch/acng/html/config-servquick.html#config-servquick
[2] https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~bloch/acng/html/howtos.html#imp
I see much reading in my future <grin>
Thanks.
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