Scott Venier said:
On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, David Lee Ludwig wrote:
I am currently helping to manage a small network of Linux workstations, each of which runs Debian. Given that each workstation has a good amount of hard disk space on it, I generally keep software installations local. Additionally, most of the software on these machines is managed via Debian's apt system.
I'm looking for an easy way to get apt-get functionality across these workstations (all run the same version of Debian.) More specifically, I want a distributed version of "apt-get install".
Does anyone know of a pre-built set of scripts/tools that will allow me to do this, or am I going to have to write my own?
I don't know of a tool to automagically run 'apt-get install foo' but it should be easy enough to write using ssh-agent, ssh, and a foreach loop.
Be sure to setup a local proxy on your network and have apt use it. There's no point in having every machine download the package from your debian mirror over your (slower then lan speed) internet connection when one of them can do it once and the rest can copy it from that one.
I've found that keeping /var/cache/apt/archives on only one box, and NFS sharing it with the rest seems to be a good way to "proxy" ... with "apt-proxy" packages still need to be grabbed via HTTP from one box to another. with NFS, there only exists the one archive on one box. Less wasted diskspace. Similarly, I'm wondering if maybe sharing /usr/ among your boxen would work (for the most part) for what I'm guessing you want. Perhaps utilising /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/... taking debconf's example there ...oh hmm. nevermind. I can't seem to see an easy way to invoke preinst/postinst scripts on the other boxen while installing the package on one. (postinst wouldn't be a problem... but preinst would.) -- Aaron Haviland orion [at] tribble [dot] dyndns [dot] org orion [at] parsed [dot] net I blame it on the internet; and the return of swing.