[plug] APT-Proxy/Debian package sharing

[Christian]

Below is a re-post of the message I sent to the list earlier today. 
Also, many thanks to Matt for all his hard work getting the list back up
and running! :-)
--

Hi all,

I'm trying to sort something out so that I can share a common archive of
Debian packages among a handful of machines.  I'd like to managing
things so that not only can I track the package status of each machine
and keep them all roughly in sync (although some are production machines
while others are just test workstations where I can install new packages
to test them out first) but also so that I don't have to download a new
copy of each package for each machine.  I could of course just download
the packages I need with APT and then copy them across to the new
machines but that means keeping track of all the new packages which
makes it tricky.

My current solution is to use NFS to share the /var/cache/apt/archives
directory from one machine to all the others.  Of course the problems
here are that a) it's inconvenient to mount/umount these exports all the
time (although not as bad as copying over package files), b) I have to
export them writable which I don't like for obvious reasons, c) I don't
like NFS because it's ugly, insecure and difficult to firewall properly.

I tried Rusty's apt-proxy but couldn't seem to get it to work.  It
listened on the port fine but the apt-get's failed.  I posted a question
here but didn't get a response so presumably no one here uses apt-proxy
(although since that time Rusty popped up on the list and corrected a
mistake of mine so Rusty, if you're listening... ;-)  The URL to my
previous question with more details is:

	http://www.cantech.net.au/plug/1999-12/447.html

Anyway, if any one here can suggest a good way of achieving what I want
to do (possibly a different distributed filesystem?) then please let me
know.

Regards,

Christian.