I am building out my home lab with multiple Debian VM’s. I am wondering if there is a good reason to have a local Deb mirror or have all my Debian systems pull from an official mirror.
I have an ISP with 1500/150 and no data caps.
Thoughts?
Unless you have a few hundred to a thousand, no. A repo can be 1 TB+ in size, which you need to keep synced. If you only have a handful or even a few dozen, not worth it.
Most major distros discourage you build your own repo, unless you have insane amounts of VMs. Debian does recommend you use a community mirror closest to you, to save on the bandwidth used on the main repo.
Thank you. I could see both sides. Official mirrors it is.
What you can do is configure a squid-proxy and enable caching. When you do update for one system (if you use the http_proxy and https_proxy variables, I don’t remember if they’re all lower-case or all upper-case), you cache the data, then for the rest of the systems, the cache will be partially used (depending on the deb packages downloaded).