“This tutorial shows how to create a Debian/Ubuntu mirror for your local network with the tool apt-mirror. Having a local Debian/Ubuntu mirror is good if you have to install multiple systems in your local network because then all needed packages can be downloaded over the fast LAN connection, thus saving your internet bandwidth.”
who needs apt-mirror if one can just sync over ftp (for example, with rsync) and set up your own debian ftp source?
Perhaps someone managing a local network where the computers have slight different package selections?
apt-mirror takes care of repository consistency while mirroring. This may be important or not depending on your needs.
Debian repository contains data (packages) and metadata (ex. what packages are available). If you mirror metadata first, APT will try to download packages not yet mirrored and fail.
For other benefits, why don’t you look at apt-mirror’s homepage yourself.
Another nice alternative if your only goal is improve speed and reduce bandwidth is to not build a whole mirror, but simply use a caching HTTP proxy. Apt will run across HTTP, and Squid takes almost no time to set up.
I have used this for an install party with a line not really big enough for everyone.
Indeed and there are even apt-get specific proxies which can be used.
“approx” and “apt-proxy”. The latter of which I wrote about here:
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/338
Steve
I use apt-cacher in the company I work and its great.
You can save much more bandwith with lzma compressed debian packages (instead of gzip), here’s the details:
http://www.linuks.mine.nu/sizematters/
Well who runs such a mirror? I do, for sid and i386 main. How does it work? Just put this line in /etc/sources.list and run apt-get update:
deb http://gnu.ethz.ch/debian-lzma/ sid main