On 30/10/2011 6:29 PM, Erik Christiansen wrote:

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By the way, if you have numerous Debian machines needing package updates, you do _not_ have them all fetch those in parallel. What you do is have each host's apt subsystem use a shared local Squid cache you establish for that purpose. That way, duplicate downloads are eliminated automatically. That does sound easier than doing an "apt-get --download-only", sharing the archive via NFS (or sneakernet), and doing a "dpkg -i", but we often just end up doing what we remember how to do. In a default configuration, Squid's ideas about what is fresh are less than ideal. There are a variety of apt specific caching programs out there, or you can give squid some rules to limit how long it will consider files to be fresh.

There's two problem areas with squid. Firstly, resources can be cached for too long, so you miss critical updates. Secondly, the various files in your cache are frequently out of sync with each other. Andrew