Arch Linux

poseidon

Member

Registered: 2012-06-07

Posts: 66

Keep insulated archlinux computer up to date - how?

I plan to use archlinux as the distro for a computer running in a very small LAN w/o connection to the Internet. How could I proceed to keep that machine up to date?

My idea is to update it once every two weeks, by plugging my notebook into that LAN, which then should serve as a repo server. Then I will be able to update the machine and install new software as needed.

How could I achieve that best? My notebook will work as a local mirror as decribed in https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Local_Mirror? There are a lot of warnings and advice against doing it that way, however.

Regards
poseidon

Gcool

Member

Registered: 2011-08-16

Posts: 1,456

Re: Keep insulated archlinux computer up to date - how?

Also have a look at the Network Shared Pacman Cache wiki article. You could possibly just share the notebook's pacman cache through a NFS share or so.

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Burninate!

Pres

Member

Registered: 2011-09-12

Posts: 423

Re: Keep insulated archlinux computer up to date - how?

Any reason you are considering Arch for this? This is probably a situation where a distro like Debian Stable would work much better.

fiddlinmacx

Member

Registered: 2011-03-02

Posts: 89

Re: Keep insulated archlinux computer up to date - how?

I do this. I have dial-up Internet at home. I have a shared pacman cache (just change the pacman.conf to point to an NFS share) and use quickserve /var/lib/pacman on my laptop to update my other computers.

I use yaourt -Sup --print-format '%s %l'|grep -v Starting|sort -n|grep "^0 "|gawk -F" " '{print $2}' > updates.lst to get a list of updates from my LAN computers and then use wget to download the files onto my laptop. I then copy the contents of /var/cache/pacman/pkg to my shared cache at home and update my computers.

The only time there's a problem is when this process pulls in a new dependancy. You can use cacheclean to keep your cache lean. If you're only doing this once a week or so it's no big deal. I have 3 machines that I keep updated this way. ssh and screen are my friends in this ;-)

fiddlinmacx

Member

Registered: 2011-03-02

Posts: 89

Re: Keep insulated archlinux computer up to date - how?

I just like knowing that I have everything up to date. That's one of my reasons for using Arch in the first place ;-)