Hi,

I have a couple of computers running Debian Sarge that I keep up to date with the SynAPTic package manager.
Due to very slow telephone lines, I do all of the updates on one machine then copy (usb stick) the /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb files over, so that the (sometimes days) long downloads do not need to be done over. The only part on the second machine that needs to be downloaded is the RELOAD data (apt-get update, I believe). I would like to maintain a non-internet machine too, so my question is ... what do I need to do (or copy) to avoid the internet connection requirement for the RELOAD???

Thanks,
Steven Peckham.

You could setup the machine you use to download as a apt repository and let the other machines download from it...

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/re...-howto.en.html

This how-to also covers how the index files are created..

Thanks farslayer (whoever you are).
I am not sure how to build the repository, and the machine I am causing the problem is not connected to anything else. Given the info you gave me (thanks again for that), my copy to usb script now looks like
#!/bin/sh
#
cd /var/cache/apt/archives
cp -puv *.deb /mnt/usb/archives
dpkg-scanpackages . /dev/null | gzip -9c > /mnt/usb/archives/Packages.gz
sync

and I added a line to the bottom of /etc/apt/sources.list (on the computer that I want to maintain) that looks like
deb file:///mnt/usb/archives ./
and everything seems to work fine

Thanks again,
Steven Peckham