A good Debian package caching system
I’ve got several servers on my network and I’m ok with that. Honestly, I am. The problem I run in to is that I end up wasting bandwidth by keeping them all up to date. In the past, I’ve tried apt-proxy (not the only one who’s had problems) and, most recently, debtorrent but they inevitably fail. Why is this? It doesn’t matter, I just need something to work. I heard about Approx and am giving it a try. It’s not a daemon, but something invoked by inetd. It’s also written in OCaml, which has a decent reputation for stability. It coped easily with 3 computers updating at the same time (something which none of the others could do) so we’ll see how it works. Hopefully this one won’t choke like the others did.
I’ve used approx for a couple of years after giving up on apt-proxy. It’s been solid for me. About the only negative thing I can say about it is it makes it difficult to see where your package lists are coming from during the download, but that is a nitpick.