I am maintaining quite a few machines that run Debian. I presently only
have access to a 56K modem link. I have some powerpc machines and some
intel machines. I presently try to keep them in sync by doing an
"apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade" on one intel machine and one powerpc
machine. I then ftp the .deb files to all the other machines so that
the files are not downloaded via the internet when I do an "apt-get
upgrade".
This is a very manual procedure and I still have to do an "apt-get
update" on each machine. I haven't found a way to copy the file list yet.
Is there a way to synchronise machines with the exact same versions of
software ?
Is there a way to have some machines have a particular configuration of
software and other machines have another configuration ? eg. my
machines used for network testing do not require X windows but the
workstations do.
Is the best way to mirror the entire Debian source/binaries for the
architectures I'm interested in. This could be expensive for us and
also take up a great deal of disk space. Is there a way of finding out
the size of the complete source and/or binary distributions for each
architecture ?
Please advise on this import system admin task. Are there any docs I
can read on this matter for Debian systems ?
Is there a more appropriate Debian mailing list that the debian-user list ?
Thanks,
Brendan Simon.
