http://www.fooishbar.org/blog/2004/Oct/08 Daniel Stone http://www.fooishbar.org/blog/2004/Oct/08 daniel@fooishbar.org Copyright 2004-2009 Daniel Stone, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License PyBlosxom http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/ 1.3.2 2/13/2006 2004-10-08T02:05:00Z http://www.fooishbar.org/blog/2004/10/08/ghettoMirror-2004-10-08-03-05 2004-10-08T02:05:00Z 2004-10-08T02:05:00Z ... in which our hero performs an install without a CD-ROM drive, seeded almost entirely from /var/cache/apt/archives. <br /><br /> I last installed my desktop ages ago, and since then I've dist-upgraded almost every package that's installed. Installing my X40 has been fun: our bandwidth is incredibly limited by transfer, so instead of grabbing an ISO (not like it has a CD-ROM drive anyway), I decided to attempt a netboot install from /var/cache/apt/archives. <br /><br /> First, I set up apt-move to move /var/cache/apt/archives to a mirror directory, and to mirror something replicating the standard Ubuntu archive. Secondly, I set up dhcpd3 to netboot the contents of pxeboot.tar.gz (found on http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/warty/main/daily-installer-i386), to the trusty laptop. <br /><br /> Now, here comes the fun. Once this was done, I needed to wget the main/debian-installer/binary-i386 Packages{,.gz,.bz2} file, and manually drop the sums/sizes into the Release file, which needed to be altered to specify the right component/suite. Once this file was there, a small for script got every single udeb specified in the d-i Packages file, and dropped it into the pool structure. Once all these things were satisfied, I was on my way to a netboot install, with minimal bandwidth consumed; thanks to Colin Watson for patiently putting up with my stupid questions.