Hello all,

I've got 5 machines in my room running slackware, and every now and then a big load of packages (~50Mb onwards) need to be upgraded with slackware.

Its a pain and a waiste of bandwidth to run swaret on each machien and download them 20Mb or 50Mb five times on all five machines.

Is there a way i can download all the updates on one of the machines (and update it ofcourse), and let swaret use these downloaded updates instead of re-downloading them again from the web?

Thanks,

5 machines that is a good amount of machines. But anyways. In the default /etc/swaret.conf file it saves all of the downloads to /var/swaret. Then on one of the machines you can run samba, you run this on the machine with the most recently downloaded packages of course. Then from the client computers mount the network drive and cd to the mounted directory, and installpkg.

-tank

i thought of making use of the old machines.. feel free to take some if you live in london =)

Thanks, i dont presume there's an automated way in installing the packages is there? just incase i get 20+ packages to install ?

As far as automated, just let swaret run as a cron job with the -a switch after --upgrade; it will d/l and install all upgradeable packages automatically.

But what I believe you are asking about is something more along the lines of creating your own local repository. This is very doable, although I can't say exactly how. One machine can check and update the packages daily (sync up with mirrors) and the other machines would just need the path to that machine added to swaret.conf. I think I saw something concerning this in the faq or forum on the swaret site.

In swaret.conf on your 5 machines, you should be able to add a line (and comment out the rest) which points to the download folder on your main box. Then run swaret --update and swaret --upgrade -a - you could even set it as a cron job, if you feel adventurous.

I use NFS for syncing my packages between laptop and desktop, and have /var/cache as an export on my desktop to share to my laptop. Makes it pretty easy to do upgrades and the like, only downloading once.
I don't use swaret, though, I use slapt-get.

--Shade