Automated caching of your Ubuntu updates

If you wish to automatically cache all you Ubuntu/Debian updates on one computer, you can use Squid-deb-proxy. This is useful if you have multiple Ubuntu/Debian clients in your network and they all download the updates. Instead of each system connecting to the internet to get the updates, it will get the updates from the caching server.

The advantage of caching:

• Save on bandwidth
• Get updates faster
• Can be more secured, only the caching server needs to have direct internet connection.

The advantage of using this package is as follows.

• No complicated configurations
• No client configuration (just install the client)
• Gets the updates from the caching server when available and automatically switches to direct connection when caching server is not available

To install this on Ubuntu, use the Ubuntu Software Center (or using your favourite package management tool) .

Install these two packages on the system that will act as a server.

squid-deb-proxy

squid-deb-proxy-client

Install this package on each of the client systems.

squid-deb-proxy-client

Bingo, you are now ready to go. Every file that is downloaded on the client system, will also be automatically cached on the server.

squid-deb-proxy is the server. squid-deb-proxy-client is the client, which you should also install on the server, so that it caches all the updates on the server as well.

Additional notes for customising your configuration/debugging.

This folder contains all your configuration information:

/etc/squid-deb-proxy

in this folder:

This is the file where you can add additional mirrors.

mirror-dstdomain.acl

The first few times, you should monitor your logs, to ensure it is working as desired.

This folder contains all the log files.

/var/log/squid-deb-proxy

Happy Hacking! Or Should I say happy caching?