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Billy Crook wrote:
Has anyone ever heard of a package manager that 'scans' other machines within its subnet or within specified subnets for updates before using the official repositories? There would either have to be some service advertisement protocol lime MDNS or each machine would literally have to scan for a designated port number listening for these requests on all machines. Once they locate each other, the idea would be ome machine downloads 500MB of updates from the repo, and from there on, every other machine (with the same distro and arch) just pulls from the faster local machine, rather than using up inet bandwidth.
Any suggestions (Other than a dedicated local repository mirror)?
You should of course just have a local debian repository (partial credit given for ubuntu)! :)
One option short of a full local repo would be to configure your systems to update via a web proxy. Then just take a system with some spare HDD space, setup squid, and configure how much disk space you want to eat up as a local cache of the packages you're actually using. This method is centralized rather than distributed, but there's not much to setup (just the one proxy server, and tell the update clients about your proxy).
You can even get fancy and use transparent proxying to make the entire process invisible to the clients. Then you'd only have to setup the proxy server and some firewall redirect rules.
NOTE: This works quite well for apt on debian. I haven't used RH other than via RHN (and even that's been a few years), so I'm not sure how well it would work for current RH or Fedora releases. As long as the actual file transfers are done with http, however, the caching proxy idea should work pretty well.
- -- Charles Steinkuehler [email protected]