Over the holidays I was visiting my parents and helping my brother with his Ubuntu system. One of the biggest drawbacks of heading up that way for a visit is leaving the fiber-optic comforts of home and heading up to DSL villa. I swear its like rewinding a decade and hearing the hellish dial-up noises all over again!
In any event, I was helping my brother update his Ubuntu machine and was getting tired of seeing the estimated download time hover around 18hrs! It was about that time that I got to thinking… “my laptop is up to date. There should be a way for him to simply download the updates from my machine over the LAN.” After some Google magic I came across Apt-Cacher and a cure was found!
“Apt-cacher performs caching of .deb packages which have been downloaded by local users. When a package is requested, the cache checks whether it already has the latest version, in which case it sends the package to the user immediately. If not, it downloads the package while streaming it to the user at the same time. A local copy is then kept for use by other users.”
Apt-Cacher will allow you to centrally cache any updates or installed packages on a central machine and help you save bandwidth. No matter if you have two Ubuntu machines or twenty, as far as your bandwidth is concerned your ISP will only think you have one! Below are steps for setting up Apt-Cacher.
First, of course, we’ll need to install it (it only needs to be installed on one central machine).
sudo aptitude install apt-cacher
To test that it is installed correctly you can try visiting the address below:
http://[localhost]:3142/ or http://[LOCAL.IP]:3142/
If you see the Apt-Cacher page the server end of things are setup. There are a few other things you can tweak, and you’ll probably want to take a look at a few configuration options such as allowed_hosts and denied_hosts. You can edit these settings in the /etc/apt-cacher/apt-cacher.conf
allowed_hosts=192.168.0.0/24 (to allow all local machines)
denied_hosts=
You also need to configure Apt-Cacher to “go live” so you’ll need to change one more option in another file. Simply change the AUTOSTART within /etc/default/apt-cacher from 0 to 1.
sudo vim /etc/default/apt-cacher
AUTOSTART=0
to
AUTOSTART=1
And one last option to run on the server machine is to import any existing .deb packages on that machine into the Apt-Cache database. Use the following command to import your current cache:
sudo /usr/share/apt-cacher/apt-cacher-import.pl /var/cache/apt/archives
After you’ve made any of these changes to the apt-cacher.conf file you’ll need to restart Apt-Cacher by using:
sudo /etc/init.d/apt-cacher restart
The next thing to do is simply point your other local machines to this central machine instead of the central repositories. You’ll want to first backup your original sources.list using the command:
sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list-backup
And then simply edit your the file to look something more like:
deb http://[LOCAL.IP]:3142/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy main restricted
deb http://[LOCAL.IP]:3142/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy universe multiverse
deb http://[LOCAL.IP]:3142/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-updates main restricted
deb http://[LOCAL.IP]:3142/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-updates universe multiverse
deb http://[LOCAL.IP]:3142/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-security main restricted
deb http://[LOCAL.IP]:3142/archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-security universe multiverse
You’ll notice that I’ve simply prefixed archive.ubuntu.com with the local network address of the machine running Apt-Cacher and specified the default port. This is a broken down version of a sources.list for the sake of space. From there on everything should run the same as normal.
Now you can give things a spin by checking for updates as normal.
sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude upgrade
Everything should appear as normal. Remember you can also continue to use this to install individual packages on each machine. Not all the machines need to carry the same either. Whatever is requested from any machine will be checked on the Apt-Cacher server and retrieved if it isn’t yet available.
For more information on using Apt-Cacher you might be interested in these pages:
How to setup a repository cache with Apt-Cacher
Debian Universe Apt-Cacher Information
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