On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 09:20:43AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
I am running Stretch that was fully updated/upgraded less than a week ago. I have the flash drive used to do the original install of Stretch. I have not _intentionally_ purged any files from cache.I wish to install Stretch on two additional machines. I am near my internet data cap and wish to make *ABSOLUTE MINIMAL* usage of available bandwidth.The purpose of this is to test the _installation process_ itself. That eliminates anything resembling cloning. A secondary benefit will be learning more about how Debian does things.Suggestions?
I have not tried any of this, but this would be my plan of attack for your solution. The installer pulls its packages from another server. Normally that server is somewhere out on the internet, but to save on transfer costs, what if that server was inside your LAN. We also need a way to tell that server that you already have some *.deb files and you'd like to use those, rather than a solution which involves mirroring a full Debian archive. Apt-Cacher-NG appears to solve this. Firstly, you intall it on the "installed" computer (this may incur transfer costs). Secondly, you start apt-cacher-ng running (it appears[1] to need minimal configuration). Thirdly, you import your already downloaded files[2] (you'll find apt's cache at /var/cache/apt/archive/*.deb). Finally, during installation, tell the installer to use apt-cacher-ng as a proxy (http://IP-OR-NAME.OF.INSTALLED.COMPUTER:3142/). What should happen is that apt-cacher-ng receives a request "GET blah_123.deb". If it finds a copy of the file in it's cache, it serves that from disk. Otherwise it downloads the file from upstream (this will incur transfer costs) AND stores it to disk. The next time any computer requests "blah_123.deb", apt-cacher-ng will be able to serve it locally, instead of having to download it again. As I say, I've not used apt-cacher-ng myself, but from the documentation, it looks like it'll work. [1] https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~bloch/acng/html/config-servquick.html#config-servquick [2] https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~bloch/acng/html/howtos.html#imp
TIA
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