Ubuntu Mirror

Working with Ubuntu exclusively on my workstation now since April 24th (Jaunty release). I've also been exploring virtualization technology as well. I gave XenServer, KVM a try. Settled on VMware only because the files were portable (so I can take it to work). I'll write about the different products another time.

My intent was to create a VM so that I can run some genealogy software. The VM for the obvious reason of backing it up easily. Funny thing is that after installing Ubuntu (a few times) it appeared to me that Ubuntu *required* a connection to the Internet to install. I found out after some experimentation that this isn't the case. Anyway, I wanted to set up a mirror so that I didn't need to do this. However, I didn't want to set up a mirror by downloading the entire Ubuntu repository (22+ GB).

So I experimented with apt-mirror and here are some of my results.

- I purchased the entire Ubuntu repository from a store called LinuxStore.ca (LinuxStore.org.uk).
- So instead of downloading the mirror I wanted to copy it from my set of DVDs
- I followed the instructions in setting up apt-mirror
- Instead of pointing mirror.list to a mirror like http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu I followed an instruction to add the line: deb file:/media/cdrom/ubuntu jaunty main
- This didn't work so I read the /usr/bin/apt-mirror perl script
- Problem with the script is that it strips "http://" from the mirror name and creates a folder under /var/spool/apt-mirror/skel/. Since my URL = file:/media/cdrom/ubuntu this just didn't work.
- So what I ended up doing was keeping a single entry in the mirror.list file and mirroring that (i.e. jaunty-security main - 66 MB).
- I then confirmed the file structure and copied the pattern for the rest of the files
- I then confirmed file structure of the locally (DVD) retrieved files by confirming that apt-mirror when executed would update the packages
- Therefore I know that copying universe and multiverse components (from the DVD) of the repository will work correctly

Quick summary

- If I could do this again I would not buy the entire repository. Downloading "main" and "restricted" is good enough.
- Creating a mirror isn't necessary. You can point any VM sources.list file to a local directory or a NFS mounted file system or a DVD mounted iso and apt-get will retrieve the files.

Ubuntu Install

/dists/jaunty/binary-i386/main/Release.gz contains the list of packages for the component (i.e. main)
/pool/main/a
/pool/main/b ... etc.
contains all the packages.
Running apt-mirror for a different component, eg. main, will check the most recently available packages from the repository and update your mirror. So this is the benefit of using apt-mirror.

Question: Is the archive of apt-mirror the same as an archive stored at /var/cache/apt/archive ?
When running Update Manager it saves the updated packages to /var/cache/apt/archive .