Dapper Upgrade - Multiple Computers

[Steven Heimann]

The new upgrade procedure looks very neat.  Some comments I have read
also suggest this procedure is more likely to succeed than a
dist-upgrade so is the desirable path to follow.

My problem is I have a number of computers to upgrade at a few different
sites.  As the new upgrade-manager always goes to the network and
downloads some hundreds of megabytes I was looking for a way to prevent
this download happening many times.  I guess the squid proxy will cache
most of the data but this means at least one download for each site.

Any suggestions about how others get around this problem would be most
appreciated.  A few of my ideas follow but I am not sure if they would
work.

I thought perhaps I could download the CD and perhaps edit the
sources.list file to include the CD and then run update-manager.  Would
this cause update-manager to take whatever packages it can from the cd
and only go to the network for packages updated since the cd image was
created?  Is there a better way?

Perhaps I could use the CD to build a repository on a local web server
and edit sources.list to include that source after I let update-manager
reconfigure the sources but before it starts the upgrade procedure.  Is
this feasible?


Thank you
Steven