The download took all night. It ended a little after 7 this morning, which pegs it at about 14 hours to download 65GB. My internet connection is a 10Mbit cable line, so there’s a bench mark of sorts.<\/p>\n
When I embarked on this little project, my goal was to come up with a way to force apt-cacher-ng to update all of its cache on a schedule. For the native machine\/architecture all that is required is to schedule an The more I thought about it, I realized there wasn’t any bandwidth savings to be had because, though both machines run <\/p>\n For documentation purposes, here’s the The With the config file squared away, here’s the magic command to run (as root):<\/p>\n I didn’t make any other changes to From here, I had to modify my I used the same technique for the opera and security repositories.<\/p>\n From here, I tested it out and aptitude found everything to its liking. So my server is good to go. I’ll just have to point my EEE’s The last config step I took was to setup a cron job that runs apt-mirror daily. Fortunately, that was taken care of during the install and I just had to enable it in the Now, the real test will be using it over an extended period of time. I’ll also remove apt-cacher-ng since I don’t need it anymore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The download took all night. It ended a little after 7 this morning, which pegs it at about 14 hours to download 65GB. My internet connection is a 10Mbit cable line, so there’s a bench mark of sorts. When I embarked on this little project, my goal was to come up with a way to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,10],"class_list":["post-733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","tag-apt","tag-debian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=733"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":736,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733\/revisions\/736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}apt-get update<\/code> which can be done by enabling it in the apt config files. But I couldn’t figure out how to force the same thing for a foreign architecture (ie- for another computer running i386 based stuff) so the files would already exist on the network.<\/p>\ndebian\/testing<\/code>, they both required different sets of package files because of the different architectures. Therefore, anything I was doing was going to be for creating a more convenient update process by having the files already present on the local network. The apt-mirror<\/code> package isn’t ideal since it downloads an entire repository for a debian branch rather than caching and updating just the packages I need. However, it’s better than a full-blown mirror and, once it’s initially setup, the downloading is merely a matter of updating the local repository. In the end, it seemed like the best compromise.<\/p>\nmirror.list<\/code> config file:<\/p>\ndeb http:\/\/ftp.us.debian.org\/debian\/ testing main contrib non-free\ndeb-src http:\/\/ftp.us.debian.org\/debian\/ testing main contrib non-free\ndeb http:\/\/security.us.debian.org\/ testing\/updates main\ndeb-src http:\/\/security.us.debian.org\/ testing\/updates main\ndeb http:\/\/deb.opera.com\/opera\/ testing non-free\ndeb-amd64 http:\/\/ftp.us.debian.org\/debian\/ testing main contrib non-free\ndeb-amd64 http:\/\/security.us.debian.org\/ testing\/updates main\ndeb-amd64 http:\/\/deb.opera.com\/opera\/ testing non-free\n<\/code><\/pre>\ndeb-amd64<\/code> is how the different architectures to mirror are specified. That sort of nugget isn’t documented or explained at all. I found help from this guy<\/a> and also spent a little time looking at the source code to verify. For good measure, here’s another<\/a> pretty good explanation.<\/p>\nsu apt-mirror -c apt-mirror\n<\/code><\/pre>\nmirror.list<\/code> so the directory tree is built under \/var\/spool\/apt-mirror\/mirror<\/code>. When the command completed, I got a bunch of, apparently, harmless error messages. It’ll also specify if there is any cleanup to do and lists the command to run to achieve it.<\/p>\nsources.list<\/code> to point at localhost<\/code> instead of the url locations. For instance, the line deb http:\/\/ftp.us.debian.org\/debian\/ testing main contrib non-free<\/code> became deb http:\/\/localhost\/debian\/ testing main contrib non-free<\/code>. I already had apache<\/code> running so I just had to add a symbolic link from my document root to the directory tree. Like so:<\/p>\nln -s \/var\/spool\/apt-mirror\/mirror\/ftp.us.debian.org\/debian\/ \/var\/www\/debian\n<\/code><\/pre>\nsources.list<\/code> at the server for the next step. Hopefully no issues there.<\/p>\n\/etc\/cron.d\/apt-mirror<\/code> file. I changed the time to something in the early morning when the system is unlikely to be in use. I also adjusted my cron.daily job appropriately to minimize the opportunity for conflicts.<\/p>\n