Now this presents its special problem: how to keep all of them up-to-date. Updates are never easy, especially with new kernel images. And with Ateneo's fluctuating bandwidth (too many lab assistants watching Youtube), it's a problem that's much compounded.
After some research, I found my solution:
apt-cacher.There are several tutorials around apt-cacher (here and here, for example), but I initially had some trouble following them. I think it might have been caused by the naming conventions around the
path_name in the configuration file.A more reflective reread of the aforementioned documents will help, but for brevity's sake, this is what I did:
On the server:
1. Installed apt-cacher on the designated server (it312server, in this case; I updated the
/etc/hosts file of the clients to reflect that.)2. Changed the AUTOSTART=0 line of /etc/default/apt-cacher to AUTOSTART=1.
3. Restarted apt-cacher with
/etc/init.d/apt-cacher restart.On the clients:
1. Updated the
/etc/hosts file of the clients to reflect it312server's IP address.2. Changed every instance of
http://ph.archive.ubuntu.com (my nearest repository) to http://it312server:3142/ph.archive.ubuntu.comAnd that's it.
A more fundamental problem was in my understanding of the way apt-cacher worked. I thought that apt-cacher would take the existing repositories from the designated server and make that available to the clients. Apparently that's not the case. Instead, apt-cacher will only cache the packages requested by the clients.
There's supposed to be a command,
sudo /usr/share/apt-cacher/apt-cacher-import.pl /var/cache/apt/archives, which will copy the existing APT cache of the server to apt-cacher's own cache (which is actually separate, apparently), but I ran into symlink problems with that.So anyway, lesson learned: initiate one update and upgrade cycle first from one machine. Then the rest follow.
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