[apt-get experts] long delayed, partial downloads keep resetting

Oli D vhann3000 at gmail.com
Fri Jun 19 20:33:36 UTC 2009


Hi,

My lil' story (so people can help me better):
Since I only have 56kbits/sec Internet bandwidth at my parents' place
and still want to keep the Kubuntu systems there up-to-date,
I add the following idea:
My Linksys WRT54GS running DD-WRT wakes on lan (cron job) one of the
computer at 22:30 each night. At 23:00 (let a lot of time to boot in
case the system decides it must fsck the 70 GiB PATA + 250 GiB SATA drives),
the cron daemon dials up on the Internet using a custom-made BASH script
and, upon successful completion, 'apt-get -dy update && apt-get -dy
upgrade'.
I then upgrade manually to avoid the system resolving package conflicts
itself
(since '-d' is 'download-only').

Then, each morning, the cron daemon stops the update, apt-cacher-import the
downloaded packages (because I have 2 computers running Kubuntu Linux)
then disconnects the computer from the Internet.

The setup works perfect, except for extra huge packages (such as
openarena-data and/or alienarena-data), which are 280MiB each (which,
at my current Internet connection is around 30 hours each...). Still, there
wouldn't be any problem since apt-get seems to be able to resume partial
downloads. But the thing is I found, by inspecting /var/cache/apt/partial
that the
package starts downloading the first night, resumes where it was stopped the
second... then restarts all over the third.

By looking at 'apt-get' manpage, I saw there's an option archive::maxAge or
something like that, but it seems to only concern index files.

Finally, please don't try to suggest me alternative ways if you don't know
how
to have the download continue, in the current situation nothing else will do
(I don't live at my parents place so can't bring huge package updates on a
USB
key, debmirror is an already tried workaround but I want to have an
"autarchic"
solution).

Thanks in advance,
Vhann

Note: For the sake of others having similar question (shall it ever occur),
I including the
URLs to other places I posted this question (shall I receive an answer to
one of these):
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7483834#post7483834
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