[Nottingham] apt-walkabout or similar

[Alan Pope]

On 27/09/05, Michael Erskine <msemtd at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> How do other members distribute updates for their apt-based distributions?
> Ideally I'd like to download all updates on a machine with access to
> plentiful bandwidth, store them on some removable media (preferably with
> changelogs too), and provide updates to similarly configured machines with
> less or no bandwidth. I've just stumbled across apt-walkabout and I'm
> currently studying the manpages. I'm looking for "standard practices" if
> there are any!
>

I don't carry my apt repository around with me, but I do have measures
to reduce network bandwidth utilisation. I have a script called
local-apt [1] which I have modified slightly. It downloads all updates
overnight (via cron) so the latest packages are on each local machine
in the morning when i check them. I have modified the script to have
an export http_proxy=http://192.168.129.4:3128/ which is my squid
proxy server. That way once one machine has grabbed the files, the
others get them from the proxy. I had to tell my proxy to cache large
files as it has a limit in place. I get an email list each day telling
me what packages were downloaded overnight (from local-apt too) and I
decide whether to update the machines or not.

The next day I just apt-get upgrade and off they go.

Cheers,
Al.
[1] http://www.darksatanic.net/svn/local-apt/trunk/local-apt