Saturday update -- not your cute little tiggy

[mdlbear]

Did a little shopping earlier this afternoon, and bought a B&D Hedge Hog for dealing with the jungle vines in the back 40 (that's 40 feet, of course). This isn't a cute little tiggy-wiggie we're talking about here; it's a 22" electric hedge trimmer, pulling about a third of a horsepower. Watch your fingers.

Yes, as a matter of fact having a local Debian mirror does make upgrades faster. By a lot. Took over four-and-a-half hours to rsync, but since I pulled the copy at work on Wednesday or Thursday, that's not doing too badly. The cron job is set for 4am, so it shouldn't be a problem in any case unless there's a major update, and now that Sarge is frozen that's a lot less likely than it was a week ago.

Did a little guitar/vocal practicing; having ciarhwyfar over made for a good excuse.

Comments

[tiggerypum.livejournal.com]

What you calling a tiggy-wiggie? :P

[mdlbear]

Brit slang for a hedgehog (most likely by way of hedge-hog -> hedge-pig -> piggie -> tiggie)

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Yup - about the only use for the SuSE install media I have at this point is to pull an image of the DVD so I can do NFS installs. It's a whole lot faster.

I keep a local mirror of the SuSE online-update stuff, too.

(Yet another way in which Linux kicks MS's butt; you simply can't do that with Windoze, unless you have a Windows Server machine running IIS and the full gamut of SMS computer-control-cum-security-hole stuff on every single machine.)

[mdlbear]

Agreed -- it's amazing how fast you can do an update at full ethernet speed -- all of a sudden the limiting factor is how fast your target machine can decompress the packages. Debian normally uses HTTP rather than NFS, I wouldn't be surprised if that's even faster.

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

I've gone over to doing installs that way too: I have an ISO image of the SuSE DVD loopback-mounted, and then I install over HTTP. It works beautifully.

At work, I went to the trouble of setting up a AutoYaST autoinstaller; people can download a 60MB ISO, burn it to a CD, and it will do a full install over the network. Quite nice.

[mdlbear]

Of course, hardly anyone installs Debian from CD or even DVD -- it's 30GB or so these days. You just install the base, then add what you need from a networked repository. I used a USB drive to haul a copy of the mirror home from work.

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Oy, and I've had people complain that SuSE is bloated! :)

(No, I don't actually believe that, and I know that it just means that you've got more choice on what to install.)

That said, I'd be one of those people, unless I wanted to haul my machine into work to do the install; my connection isn't fast enough to want to consider doing that.

[mdlbear]

The base is actually pretty big, and there are several customized Debian-based distros that install almost everything you need off a single CD. I often use DeMuDi, which has a lot of music- and audio-related stuff. Then it's just a matter of filling in the holes, which doesn't take all that long even if one of the holes is Emacs. And if you're maintaining multiple machines there are several different ways to share the package cache.

I have the slowest possible DSL connection here (384Kb/s down, 128 up) and it was mostly fast enough for installs; I just got spoiled at work. Now, though, I just rsync the mirror overnight.

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

My connection (Ricochet) tops out at 200Kbps on a perfect day; usually, I see more like 100Kbps. I jokingly refer to it as "medium-band" - faster than dialup, but slower than anything else.

But, it's only $24 a month (my only other options are cable at $60 or satellite at $100, which I can't really afford right now). I mean that literally - dialup isn't an option, since we don't have a phone line. I did at least learn recently that QWorst and our mobile park have gotten their act together and it'll actually be possible for us to get one, now.

[mdlbear]

Yeah, that's a little thin for maintaining a mirror. Would be enough to keep up with updates a few months after Sarge goes stable -- the Debian "stable" release tends to be very stable.

The bandwidth of a hard drive in your briefcase should not be underestimated. See this post

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's how I maintain my mirror now. I was doing it from home, since SuSE will do delta RPMs, but now it's just easier for me to carry it back and forth and save my "extra" bandwidth for better things.