ubuntu-ngo team mailing list archive

[Alan Pope <alan@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Stephen,

2009/9/8 Stephen Michael Kellat <skellat@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> "offline mirror"
>

I have a mirror of karmic on a 32GB USB stick. It could be plugged
into a machine and the contents dumped out onto local storage. Once
done, it can be unplugged and posted to someone with significant
bandwidth for updating. Even with ropey postal service a turn around
of a month (at worst) and a week (at best) would mean the local mirror
isn't _that_ out of date.

> An off-line mirror initially sounds like a good idea but faces a chicken
> and the egg question.  Who is creating the mirror?
> Who is shipping the mirror?  How is the mirror being kept up to date?

Organisations in nations with significant bandwidth. An upfront cost
for the media plus a subscription model covering the cost of postage
and a small fee for bandwidth would potentially work. Not sure how
much demand there would be, as we have discussed on the list
previously.

> While there are some
> vendors presently offering a snapshot of the Ubuntu repositories on a
> set of DVDs, is this something that there should be constantly rebuilt
> snapshots of?

Taking DVD into account, it's certainly possible for an initial mirror
to be sent out on a hard disk, and updates to be provided on DVD/CD on
a regular basis. Again, a subscription model would work here with
update discs being sent  out as regularly as the organisations wish -
based on their subscription level.

>  Encouraging the use of LTS releases in the field and
> making offline mirrors of just security updates would reduce the
> logistical overhead on this mightily.
>

Indeed, and not shipping the source code and debug packages would also
halve the mirror size and subsequent update sizes.

Cheers,
Al.