Making one machine an "apt server" for others....

[Joe Emenaker]

Some of my coworkers want to dabble in grid computing, so they got themselves about 7 old PC's and they wanted to set them up.   I put Debian on all of them, but I wanted to be able to keep them up-to-date without having all 7 hit the package servers. Since they are all configured the same, I figure, if one of them needs a new package, then they'll all need it.   So, I got to thinking... why can't machine "A" do a normal upgrade and save all of its .deb packages. Then, all of the other machines would have their sources.list file pointed to machine "A" and they'd just hit *that* machine for their updates.   I know that apt saves its packages in /var/cache/apt, so that's not a problem. The problem, to me, is in generating the Packages and Release files. Is there an easy way to do this?   - Joe