On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 12:36:31AM -0500, Mark Post wrote: > Hopefully one of the more Debian-literate people on the list can point me in > the right direction... > > Every SHARE, we have a double installfest on Friday morning. We take 30 or > so Windows systems, and install Debian and then Red Hat on them. Everyone > seems to really like the hands-on aspect, but one problem we have is that > part of the installation process asks if it should check for updates. It > would be nice if we had a local-to-the-lab APT server so that we could let > them see what that looks like, without killing the T1 connection. > > So, can anyone point me to a step-by-step procedure on how to set that up? > I'm not terribly Debian literate myself, so it would have to be pretty > detailed.
If your concern is really bandwidth, it would be much simpler to just set up squid and have everyone proxy through it; that way you only download each package once, which works out quite well for a large number of near-simultaneous network installations. Then, you wouldn't have to worry about setting up a local package repository at all. But, to answer your question, the tool that you want is apt-ftparchive(1), included in the apt-utils package. It has a detailed man page, but for the simplest case, a flat directory full of random .debs for a single architecture, the usual command line would be: apt-ftparchive packages . | gzip -9 > Packages.gz and the corresponding line in /etc/apt/sources.list would look something like this: deb http://some.host/path/to/dir ./ -- - mdz
