Saturday, June 08, 2013

bandwidth limiting apt-get

I'm doing dist-upgrades to Mint Olivia from Mint-Nadia at home on a weekend. That's not such a great time since on the weekend Timmy likes to view youtube videos. And I think my sister-in-law streams tagalog movies. I could do it at night (and I did, for my first guinea pig laptop last night) but I'd rather get some of that done in the daytime too. Fortunately it's google and commandlinefu.com to the rescue. The magic command line arguments to apt-get are:
-o Acquire::http::Dl-Limit=20 -o Acquire::https::Dl-Limit=20
I could set the limit to 100 or 150 and there wouldn't be much complaint, but I'm setting it to 75 since I don't mind if it takes a while. I do have squid in front, so some of the packages will be in the cache. I'm only going to save about half the bandwidth though since two laptops are i386 and the other two are x64. Ah, but for now, I think even better is rsyncing /var/cache/apt from the other i386 machine to this one.

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