[Gllug] Apt and RPM caching experiences

[John Edwards]

On Mon, Jul 04, 2011 at 11:51:25AM +0100, j.roberts wrote:
> On 04/07/2011 11:36, John Edwards wrote:
<snip> 
> 1 - just run updates
> 10-20 - squid cache makes sense to me, I'm going to try this again
> 100+ - local full cache is justified
> 
> ?
> 
> Seems reasonable, of course I may well have overlooked something...

Debian has 29,000 packages, Ubuntu has even more than that. Even on a
full-fat desktop machine with both Gnome and KDE you are unlikely to
install more than 10% of them. Lots of those packages are translations
for languages, some of which are rather rare and I doubt any network
needs all of them.

So by mirroring everything for your architectures you are transfering
and storing about 10 times more data than you need. If you use caching
then you are only transfering those packages that are actually used by
your machines and no more than that.

Another advantage of caching is that you get the status files as they
are *now*, not what they were at the time the last sync finished -
which could be over 24 hours depending on your bandwidth. This might
mean that you think you have updated your machines for the latest
security bug but have not downloaded all the packages because there
was a delay.

There are advantages to having a local mirror, one of which is that
you can control what packages are automatically updated (eg by using
the unattended-upgrades packages). This can give you time to test the
packages on certain machines and pass the red tape required in some
large organisations.


-- 
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|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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