Getting updated (was: Re: [plug] Woody on 7 CDs!? Why?)

Trevor Phillips T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au
Wed Jul 24 11:48:22 WST 2002


On Wednesday 24 July 2002 11:03, Leon Blackwell wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 24, 2002 at 10:52:59AM +0800, Trevor Phillips wrote:
> > Has anyone else used it, or other specific apt cache/proxy schemes?
>
> I've been using apt-proxy very successfully over a 28.8k dialup to
> maintain a few boxes, and I'm very impressed.  rsync saves some
> downloading for updates, and the configuration options mean you can hold
> on or release packages as you decide to.

I thought .gz files and .deb files didn't rsync well, due to their compressed 
nature making minor changes vary wildly? I commented out the default rsync 
lines, and put in http lines. Maybe that's part of my problem.

Are there any WAIX (or even Australian) rsync-able servers?

> The only thing I'm a little annoyed at is that the rsync downloading
> doesn't always stream the data smoothly through to the local connection,
> leaving aptitude's progress bars fairly useless, but then that's part of
> how rsync works.

That sounds similar to my biggest issue. From the client perspective, it 
sometimes seems like nothing is happening, and so it times out and gives an 
error, when in fact the proxy IS downloading the file, and will squirt it 
when it's all done.

As such, on a client I have to apt-get upgrade multiple times to get the full 
listing. It's a mild annoyance manually doing things, but my gateway does a 
cron'ned "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade -d -u -y", and when the package 
lists time out, it gives all sorts of errors through the rest of the 
procedure, which end up as CRON messages in my inbox.

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: Web Technical Administrator     -          T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                        -              Murdoch University | 
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