[ubuntu-in] Setting up a local Ubuntu repository mirror

[Onkar Shinde]

On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 3:54 PM, Anurag Jain <anuragjainfzd at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I'm planning to set a local Ubuntu repository mirror here in my college
> server. Since many students are turning up towards using Linux and specially
> Ubuntu is pretty famous among them, it takes incurs lots of time and
> overhead to download packages from the main server. I my college we access
> Internet via proxy and but the college website(and local ftp) hosted there
> can be accessed directly. So if its is possible to create a mirror on that
> server which will download and update the packages on its own, we'd be able
> to use that as mirror and fetch the packages at a faster rate.
>
> I've gone through couple of blogs for creating local mirrors but not sure if
> they'll surely work. So I need help regarding how to proceed with it along
> with the specifications and requirements.

There are various tools that you can use. Ubuntu main archive has
rsync interface. So you can use rsync to sync packages from that to
your local mirror. rsync will take some time to setup but it works
well.

The other tools is debmirror which you can use for partial mirroring
of the repository. The man page is self explanatory.

Yet another tool is apt-proxy. You need to set it up on a server. That
server as proxy in apt-get or synaptic. When any package is downloaded
because of an install request this package is cached. So the next
machine using this proxy automatically uses cached package when
another install request happens.

Hope this helps.


Onkar
-- 
Passion - Some people climb mountains - others write Free software.
Don't ask why - the reason is the same.