Create a Local Mirror - 2

[Bob Parnes]

Thanks very much to everyone who responded to my plea for help in creating 
a local mirror for use by fai, either from files generated by apt-move or 
from the installation CDs. I did manage to set up the server, I think; 
that is as far as I have gotten. But some problems came up, which make me 
wonder whether I got it exactly right.

1. debootstrap failed using the apt-move mirror. I used Paul Nijjar's
script to make MD5sum lines (mkMD5Release.new from wclp-0.5-installer.tar.gz
at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/wclp). It did the job, once I 
discovered that I had to add a line "md5sum" between the head and the md5sum
lines. But then the process stopped with the following messages:

W: file:/mirrors/debian/dists/woody/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz was corrupt
I: Retrieving file:/mirrors/debian/dists/woody/Packages
E: Couldn't download adduser
chroot: cannot execute apt-get: no such file or directory

Thanks to my mediocre knowledge of bash, I could not understand the scripts
used in debootstrap. I did confirm that adduser is in the mirror, and the 
mirror works fine with apt-get. So I gave up trying to use the apt-move mirror.

2. Following suggestions in the newsgroup, I set up a hard drive partition 
as a mirror of the installation CDs, where a copy of each CD is in a separate 
directory, e.g., woody1, woody2, etc. Debootstrap succeeded when I pointed it
to the woody1 directory. It did complain a lot, however, mostly about
dependencies. For example, there was an announcement that libc6, upon which
several packages depend, was not to be installed. However, a few lines later came
a report that libc6 was installed. I did a chroot to the base root directory and
was able to add a user and password, which I believe require libc6, So I guess
it is okay. But I wonder why the complaints.

3. Running fai-setup with FAI-DEBOOTSTRAP assigned to the same woody1 directory 
got past the creation of base.tgz but eventually failed, because it could not find
Packages files. This appeared to come about when the process did a chroot to
the nfsroot directory before running apt-get: there was nothing in the chrooted
system identifying the mirror. So I added lines in the create_nfsroot()
and upgrade_nfsroot() functions in the make-fai-nfsroot script. They create a 
directory, mount the partition containing the mirror before apt-get is 
run, and unmount afterward. This succeeds, but to generalize one would have
to specify an environmental variable specifying the partition containing the
mirror. I wonder what happens when debmirror is used to create the mirror by
download from the internet.

4. Fai-setup hung when discover attempted to detect hardware. So I eliminated
the package from the list of additional packages defined in make-fai-nfsroot.

This was the last problem, and fai-setup completed successfully. I still have to 
add a kernel, modules, and configuration files. But the issue of using a
local mirror created from installation CDs seems to be behind me. I appreciate 
everyone's help and would also be glad for any comments about the above points.

bp


-- 
Bob Parnes
rparnes at megalink.net