a question (or two) about vmbuilder in pre-maverick

[Robert P. J. Day]

  let me add a thing or two to my earlier post:

On Tue, 14 Sep 2010, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

>   i'm playing with the vmbuilder utility that's part of
> python-vm-builder on a fully-updated pre-maverick system so a couple
> questions.
>
>   first, is this the easiest way to create new VMs in maverick?  i
> can see other command line utils but vmbuilder seems like the
> easiest way to go.
>
>   and second, i'm following along here:
>
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/JeOSVMBuilder
>
> and experimenting with building a minimal VM, but about halfway down
> that page, there's a section entitled "Packages caching," which i
> obviously want to take advantage of given that i want to build more
> than one machine, but that section talks about setting up an apt
> proxy with:
>
>   $ sudo apt-get install apt-proxy
>
> but i don't see any such package.  can someone provide the recipe
> for configuring package caching for vmbuilder before i get into
> creating VMs?  thanks.

  just to be a bit clearer, i *think* what i'm after is the following.
when i invoke "vmbuilder" to build a VM, the very first time, i will
obviously have to download all of the packages related to the
specified suite -- by default, "lucid."

  what i'd like to specify is that, as the packages are downloaded,
they are automatically being cached in a location of *my* choice on
the local machine, so that i can keep vmbuilder-related packages
separate from any other package caching.  so maybe specifying a
localhost directory name of ".../vm" or something like that.  and when
i build a second machine, it will take advantage of those packages, of
course.

  most of the web pages i've seen refer to the package "apt-proxy",
which doesn't appear to exist anymore, but i see something called
"apt-cacher-ng", which looks like it might be what i'm after.  but my
first attempt suggests i have to create the local package mirror
first, and fill it with packages.  i don't want to do that -- i want
all the caching done automatically, if that's possible.

 surely this can't be hard, i just can't get a handle on how.  thanks.

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

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