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Chapter 6: Maintenance tasks

There are few optional tasks that need to be executed by the administrator from time to time or during the initial configuration.

6.1 Local cache cleanup

Visit the report page in a browser and trigger the operation there.

6.2 Import

  1. Make sure that apt-cacher-ng has valid index files in the cache. This is the tricky part. To get them right, a client needs to download them through apt-cacher-ng once. Therefore:

NOTE: APT is pretty efficient on avoiding unneccessary downloads which can make a proxy blind to some relevant files. ACNG makes some attempts to guess the remote locations of missed (not downloaded) files but these heuristics may fail, especially on non-Debian systems. When some import files are permantently ignored, check the process output for messages about the update of Packages/Sources files. When some relevant package sources are missing there, there is a brute-force method to force their download to the client. To do that, run:

rm /var/cache/apt/*cache.bin
rm /var/lib/apt/lists/*Packages 
rm /var/lib/apt/lists/*Sources

on the client to purge APT's internal cache, and rerun "apt-get update".

  1. Store copies of your .debs, .orig.tar.gz, ... somewhere in the "_import" subdirectory in the cache, ie. in /var/cache/apt-cacher/_import/. The files may be links or symlinks, does not matter. When done, apt-cacher will move those files to its own internal locations. Example:
    cd /var/cache
    mkdir apt-cacher-ng/_import
    cp -laf apt-proxy apt-cacher /var/cache/apt-cacher-ng/_import
    chown -R apt-cacher-ng apt-cacher-ng/_import
    
  2. Visit the report page and trigger the import action there. Check the results, look for (red) error messages. If some files could not be moved around, they are either unusable or could not be removed because of missing permissions. Remove those copies from _import directory manually.

Comments to blade@debian.org
[Eduard Bloch, Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:03:24 +0100]