<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.12.1"> </HEAD> <BODY> On Wed, 2007-07-02 at 12:59 +0000, Gabriel Dragffy wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> > Can anybody suggest any pros and cons of having a local (private) deb > mirror for a small home (~6 machines) network? </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> Why not have the benefits of a local mirror without the disadvantage of storing 200GB of data? Use apt-proxy or apt-cacher, perfectly suited for this situation. Only the files that are needed by a machine are downloaded, and then they are stored. Then all the files only get downloaded once. I found that after a year my apt-cacher cache had only grown to less than 2gb. Perfect! </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> This works iff you have machines that are largely identical. In my case I have three machines. One is my laptop which I have until recently been using only Dapper on (and am really regretting the "upgrade" to Edgy...). On it I have mostly networking client software, office software and that sort of thing. Another is my development workstation/network server/network experimentation box. This is running a very different set of packages. Finally I have my testbed which has at any given time several different versions of Ubuntu (and other distros including LFS work but that's outside of the scope of an Ubuntu repo). Apt-proxy/cacher just didn't work out for me. A carefully-selective local repository was a better bet. </BODY> </HTML>