On 2022/5/21 22:54, Linux-Fan wrote:
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
Thanks for this information. I think I overestimated the difficulty of
creating a mirror.
The advantages of using a mirror over iso images are probably worth
noting, too:
- No need to understand the working of jigdo
As a user, jigdo is easy :-) Feed 'jigdo-lite' with 'xxx.iso.jigdo' and
then go to sleep. When you wake up, the 'xxx.iso' file is ready.
- 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`.
Indeed, a local mirror is more suitable in most cases. I only come up
with a few cases that ISOs are more useful:
1) When installing packages using a mirror, the mirror machine must be
powered on. There is no need for a dedicated mirror machine if using
ISO. (This doesn't affect offline storage medias, though)
2) ISOs are faster to copy than a lot of small packages. (Rsync will be
easier to update, though)
3) ISOs are easy to verify integrity. Run 'sha512sum -c SHA256SUMS' then
you are confident there is no problem in its contents.
4) ISOs are easy to archive or create parity archives like PAR2
archives. It's more robust than having lots of small files. (Creating
tarballs may provide same advantages, though)
After all, I admit the advantages of ISOs are minor. But I think it's
good to have an alternative :-)
HTH and YMMV
Linux-Fan
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Best Regards,
Zhang Boyang
