[plug] Debmirror or what?

[Harry]

On Wed, 12 May 2004 23:07:50 +0800 Cameron Patrick
<cameron at patrick.wattle.id.au> wrote:

> | What is the best way to achieve my goal?
> 
> debmirror is probably the easiest way.  The other alternative is
> The Rsync Command Line From Hell:
> 
> rsync   --recursive --times --links --hard-links \
> 	--verbose --compress --timeout=120 \
> 	--delete --delete-after --delete-excluded \
> 	--exclude 'Contents-*.gz' \
> 	--exclude binary-arm/         --exclude "*_arm.deb" \
[...]
> You can't narrow it down to just one of stable/testing/unstable this
> way, though.

Because you are going to rsync all files from the pool without context
of which distribution they are part of, is this right ? I can see the
advantage of deb-mirror rather than using rsync as a blunt instrument. 

>  This command will also get you the source for
> everything, though you can get rid of it by adding more --exclude
> bits.

The exclude switches can be put into an exclude file so a simple rsync
script looks like:

#!/bin/sh
if  ( pidof -x rsync > /dev/null ) ; then
  echo "Already running"
else

/usr/bin/rsync -rltvz --stats --delete --delete-excluded --partial
--exclude-from=/root/bin/rsync-exclude.txt "ftp.it.net.au::debian/*"
/mirror/debian/ > /tmp/rsync-au.log

/usr/bin/rsync -rltvz --stats --delete --delete-excluded --partial
--exclude-from=/root/bin/rsync-exclude.txt "ftp.it.net.au::debian-non-US/*"
/mirror/debian-non-US/ >/tmp/rsync-au-us.log

fi

You can tail -f /tmp/rsync-au.log and watch progress.

I can send you my exclude file originally given to me by James
Bromberger and since tweaked as the architectures and naming changed.
I don't think James would mind. The last rsync I ran at poledra (many
thanks to Informed Technology) was a few weeks ago and builds an 18.3G
mirror which is woody/sarge/sid of binary i386 only.  

If you consistently install identical packages, how about looking at
apt-proxy ? I haven't used it but I remember Scott from LinuxIT
gave it good reports for their office debian installations. It
will maintain a much more compact mirror (proxy) but I guess it may need to
have access to an external mirror so it can check it's versions are fresh.
 
All the best
Harry

It might be fun to setup a few servers at the installfest so people can
park a machine and rsync a mirror. Even 18G might be served to a few
machines if they have all day to do it. Once you have a base mirror,
keeping it up to date isn't as difficult. 

-- 
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