P2P Package Manager

[Charles Steinkuehler]

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Billy Crook wrote:
> Has anyone ever heard of a package manager that 'scans' other machines
> within its subnet or within specified subnets for updates before using
> the official repositories?  There would either have to be some service
> advertisement protocol lime MDNS or each machine would literally have to
> scan for a designated port number listening for these requests on all
> machines.  Once they locate each other, the idea would be ome machine
> downloads 500MB of updates from the repo, and from there on, every other
> machine (with the same distro and arch) just pulls from the faster local
> machine, rather than using up inet bandwidth.
> 
> Any suggestions (Other than a dedicated local repository mirror)?

You should of course just have a local debian repository (partial credit
given for ubuntu)!  :)

One option short of a full local repo would be to configure your systems
to update via a web proxy.  Then just take a system with some spare HDD
space, setup squid, and configure how much disk space you want to eat up
as a local cache of the packages you're actually using.  This method is
centralized rather than distributed, but there's not much to setup (just
the one proxy server, and tell the update clients about your proxy).

You can even get fancy and use transparent proxying to make the entire
process invisible to the clients.  Then you'd only have to setup the
proxy server and some firewall redirect rules.

NOTE:  This works quite well for apt on debian.  I haven't used RH other
than via RHN (and even that's been a few years), so I'm not sure how
well it would work for current RH or Fedora releases.  As long as the
actual file transfers are done with http, however, the caching proxy
idea should work pretty well.

- --
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net
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