creating a local mirror at home computer

[Alan Pope]

On 17 March 2011 18:44, Tapas Mishra <mightydreams at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I am trying to debug a problem which necessarily needs a Ubuntu mirror
> for  install (basically problem in creating guest OS on Xen with
> virt-manager).
> So I decided to setup a local mirror of Ubuntu in a USB hard disk that
> I have of size 1TB.
> I do not have such an internet bandwidth at my home computer that I do
> an installation
> pointing to a mirror from Ubuntu repos.So I decided to download Ubuntu DVD's.
> Some where on internet I found it was mentioned this process needs 15
> GB of space basically 4 DVDs.

Eh? You don't have the bandwidth to download ~15GB of packages but you
have the bandwidth to download around 15GB of DVDs?

> While searching for DVDs I got following link
> http://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04.2/release/
> where I am able to see only 1 DVD.
> Since I do not have a high bandwidth downloading 4 DVDs for me can
> take a week or more.
> Where can I get link to remaining 3 DVDs?

We only make one DVD image (with many flavours, i386, amd64 etc), we
don't ship a 'set' of DVDs. So there are no remaining 3 DVDs. Other
people might make them and allow you to download them, but the Ubuntu
project doesn't officially make a 'full' set of DVDs containing the
entire archive.

> While searching how to create mirror I came across a tool known as
> apt-mirror and debmirror
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Debmirror
> http://www.howtoforge.com/local_debian_ubuntu_mirror

They do different things, but achieve much the same result. The other
option would be rather than download everything, setup a proxy to
cache the stuff you regularly get. So for a system where you're
re-doing the install all the time, you're going to be getting the same
packages over and over, and a caching proxy will help here.

The absolute easiest way to do this is to just install
"squid-deb-proxy" on a machine on your network, and
"squid-deb-proxy-client" on the client machines. When any client wants
to get packages, apt will go looking for a proxy automatically (via
avahi) and find the machine running squid-deb-proxy. Squid-deb-proxy
is setup to cache ubuntu packages well - whereas a standard install of
squid doesn't really, although that could work also.

When you do new installs and you get asked if you have a proxy, just
point them at the box running squid-deb-proxy and you're done.

I run a squid-deb-proxy on a machine at home because I have multiple
computers running the same release of Ubuntu. They get their packages
via that server which reduces my internet usage and doesn't require
much in the way of admin.

Al.