Richard Owlett wrote:
On 10/07/2018 08:25 PM, David Wright wrote:
[...]
Can you simultaneously
connect the machine being installed to both the internet and the
system running apt-cache-ng (and using http:)?
I haven't yet read the documentation for apt-cache-ng and don't know if
it would match my mental image. I was assuming that that all the
packages that I downloaded/upgraded were still in a cache which could be
transferred to the target machine via a flash drive. The machines are
adjacent. My current priority is verifying my Buster system is properly
setup.
Essentially apt-cache-ng (or squid) is a proxy service for your
machines.
You run it on your "main" machine (or, well any spare server or VM), and
tell apt to use that machine as a proxy.
Then, when you're on your secondary laptop (or updating additional
servers / VMs), they send all their apt requests via the proxy. If it
has the package(s) in question, it supplies them directly to the client
machine(s). If it doesn't, then you download them (and the proxy cache
is updated for next time).
Admittedly, these options work best if you have multiple machines
that're pretty much the same (e.g. that "lab" I did, where all the
desktops were identical).