Bug#1011343: WISHLIST: Offical ALL-IN-ONE images?

[Linux-Fan]

Zhang Boyang writes:

Hi,

On 2022/5/21 18:13, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:

On Sat, May 21, 2022 at 01:33:02PM +0800, Zhang Boyang wrote:

Hi,

Indeed, I admit super-big-iso is a crazy idea, and a local mirror is more
useful in most cases. I think there is a few special cases that a

[...]

Actually, setting up a local mirror is potentially almost as easy a use case
as using gigantic media files. That's exactly what many hosting companies
do in their data centres for their own use (and it's also in some of those
data centres  where some of the Debian country level mirrors are located).
So a large isolated network may find it useful to have a local mirror
updated periodically.

I admit a local mirror is more suitable for large set of computers. But for a small set of computers, for example, 1-5 computers, setting up a local mirror might be too heavy.

[...]

Actually I think this may be a misconception. Setting up a mirror for internal use is (from my experience with the `ftpsync` script, cf. https://www.debian.org/mirror/ftpmirror) pretty straight-forward. AFAIK the minimal steps are as follows:

- Download and extract ftpsync to a location
- Configure distrib/etc/ftpsync.conf
- Setup a webserver to serve the mirror directory
- Invoke mirror script
- Then point clients to the webserver location



- No need to understand the working of jigdo
- Works well with all kinds of machines
  (physical, virtual, remote etc.)
- Can span multiple architectures:
  It should come as a huge advantage in storage requirements
  if you ever need more than one architecture because unlike the
  .iso-based approach only the architectures of interest will be
  contained in the mirror and packages common for all architectures
  will only be stored once.
- Can take advantage of better file system performance, load balanching
  and caching. This would probably only affect large installations,
  though.
- In case networking is really not wanted on client machines, a mirror
  can also be rsync'ed to target storage media and then referenced by
  `file://` entries in the client's `/etc/apt/sources.list`.

HTH and YMMV
Linux-Fan

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The advantages of using a mirror over iso images are probably worth noting, too:

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