local deb mirror

[Michael T. Richter]

On Wed, 2007-07-02 at 21:08 +1100, Serg B. wrote:

> Can anybody suggest any pros and cons of having a local (private) deb
> mirror for a small home (~6 machines) network?


I have three machines and use a local mirror.  Specifically I use the
"debmirror" package from universe.

The pros are:

      * You download the repositories once at Internet speeds then
        distribute internally at LAN speeds.  This means that a big
        update (like the recent libc++ one) is spread around your
        machines far more quickly and at lower external bandwidth costs.
      * If your Internet feed goes down (this is a common occurrence
        here in China -- YMMV), you can still add packages to your local
        machines.
      * It makes system reinstallations (like I just had to do with an
        Edgy "upgrade" -- though I'm not sure that word is properly
        applied) go far faster.


The cons are:

      * It's not exactly disk space cheap.  A full mirror costs close to
        200GB.  My partial mirror (Edgy and Dapper, i386 only) takes up
        most of my 80GB external drive.
      * That first download?  Is a doozy!  (Earthquakes in Taiwan that
        cut international feeds don't help any either, let me tell
        you....)
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