A fast internet connection must for Arch?

rsamurti · 2006-12-29 17:07:05

Hello,

I have been experimenting with Arch for quite some time. The greatest strength of Arch is pacman -Syu. But is it also its greatest weakness? To keep up to date I need to frequently do pacman -Syu. For this I need a fast internet connection.

I am planning to use Arch in a production environment where there are about 40 systems interconnected in a LAN and connected to the internet through a proxy server which is not very fast. If I need to keep all these machines up to date quickly how do I go about?

Any suggestions on using Arch in a production environment? If Arch cannot be used in a production environment, then, is it not a major demerit?

I request experienced Arch users to enlighten me about deploying Arch in a serious production environment.

Thanks for your guidance,

Anand

Dusty · 2006-12-29 17:35:11

I used Arch for two years on dialup. So a fast connection is not required. My parents still used it; just before Christmas I ran a pacman -Syu that took three days downloading... but it hadn't been updated in months. When I used to live here full time I used to use trickle to run pacman in the background taking up 1K of my precious 3K/second... it sort of kept the system up to date all the time...

That's neither here nor there; what you want to do is have one of the computers on your LAN mirror the arch repos or having a local repo that contains only the packages you need (no sense mirroring packages you don't use). It will download packages through the proxy, but the other 39 systems can access the packages from that computer across the LAN. Creating your own local repo and mirrors are described in the wiki.

Dusty

LB06 · 2006-12-29 18:20:38

You don't NEED a fast internet connection. Dusty is the living proof of that.

It's a question of to what you are accustomed to. It you live on 56k all day you probably won't notice. You'll be creative with bandwidth, download only packages that you need and setup proxies for other pc's in your LAN, etc.

If you have >20mbit downstream, you'll get used to that.

Btw, could you define "not very fast"? Is it like 56k, 128k, 1024k or 10mbit? Yes, some people, including me, would classify 10mbit as not very fast considering that there are 40pc's in your lan.

neotuli · 2006-12-29 18:56:02

I used to run arch on a 56k connection. I didn't get quite as elaborate as dusty, but I think I tried to update at least once a week to keep the download sizes small. I didn't have any trouble with it.

For your situation I'd say much of what the others have said. Cache your packages on one machine, so that it only needs to be downloaded through the proxy once, not 40 times. There are many ways to do this.

Romashka · 2006-12-29 19:56:30

I do a full mirror at my work, and sometimes transfer updates on USB HDD to my home.

In the future (>= 3.1) pacman might include delta sync.

Leffe · 2006-12-29 21:17:38

Sharing /var/cache/pacman across all clients seems like the easiest solution to me.

augustob · 2006-12-30 01:38:16

Wait, what distro (or OS for that matter) allows you to keep itself and its apps up to date without a fast internet connection? Unless you came here looking for the 'create your own repo' solution, you're making a mountain out of a (imaginary) mole hill.

rsamurti · 2006-12-30 02:22:31

My only worry is about the stability of the systems which are upgraded so frequently. Can anybody give their feedback regarding this?

If some thing goes wrong after upgrade, how to revert back to the previous working state of the system?

Anand

augustob · 2006-12-30 13:05:58

rsamurti wrote:

My only worry is about the stability of the systems which are upgraded so frequently.

Do you need daily -Suys? If it's a production environment like you say, stick to a stable configuration that has all the features you need; if it isn't broken, don't fix it! Again man, mountains out of mole-hills.

chrismortimore · 2006-12-30 13:23:37

augustob wrote:

Wait, what distro (or OS for that matter) allows you to keep itself and its apps up to date without a fast internet connection?

Debian is pretty good, because the only updates you get on stable are security updates, which are quite small.

Romashka · 2006-12-30 13:29:42

rsamurti wrote:

My only worry is about the stability of the systems which are upgraded so frequently. Can anybody give their feedback regarding this?

Most of time everything will be fine. But it's highly recommended to read news on archlinux.org.
If there are some packages broken in Current/Extra/Community, they are ususlly fixed quickly. Usually only some X stuff or drivers glitches or packages not yet rebuilded with newest lib - are the most common issues. But this doesn't happen often, and is not critical (your system will not die because of this ).
Even Testing and Unstable works fine for me most of time.

With rolling release system you get small updates often, which is much better than 500M of updates with next Ubuntu/SuSE/Mandriva/Fedora/etc. release, for example. Because it's very hard to find what package breaks things in such a horde of updated packages.

rsamurti wrote:

If some thing goes wrong after upgrade, how to revert back to the previous working state of the system?

Downgrade packages

jftaylor21 · 2007-01-04 05:03:57

I think that as long as you don't delete the cache, you should have all the different versions of the packages you have ever used since each new version has a different filename. Then, it should be very easy to go back to a previous package if a newer package is buggy.

Romashka · 2007-01-04 08:40:00

jftaylor21 wrote:

I think that as long as you don't delete the cache, you should have all the different versions of the packages you have ever used since each new version has a different filename. Then, it should be very easy to go back to a previous package if a newer package is buggy.

If you don't want to keep all old versions that take space,
you can just take old versions from ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/ibiblio/distributions/archlinux/ when you need them.

Arch Linux

#1 2006-12-29 17:07:05

A fast internet connection must for Arch?

#2 2006-12-29 17:35:11

Re: A fast internet connection must for Arch?

#3 2006-12-29 18:20:38

Re: A fast internet connection must for Arch?

#4 2006-12-29 18:56:02

Re: A fast internet connection must for Arch?

#5 2006-12-29 19:56:30

Re: A fast internet connection must for Arch?

#6 2006-12-29 21:17:38

Re: A fast internet connection must for Arch?

#7 2006-12-30 01:38:16

Re: A fast internet connection must for Arch?

#8 2006-12-30 02:22:31

Re: A fast internet connection must for Arch?

#9 2006-12-30 13:05:58

Re: A fast internet connection must for Arch?

#10 2006-12-30 13:23:37

Re: A fast internet connection must for Arch?

#11 2006-12-30 13:29:42

Re: A fast internet connection must for Arch?

#12 2007-01-04 05:03:57

Re: A fast internet connection must for Arch?

#13 2007-01-04 08:40:00

Re: A fast internet connection must for Arch?

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