Question for Debianers

[Derek Neighbors]

> How much of a problem is this to do if you are living with very
> limited bandwidth? I would like to try out Deb on one of my boxes but
> the lack of bandwidth here gives me pause.

I know many dial up folks that use Debian.  I would say the day to day
update stuff wont be bad, but a dist-upgrade would be time consuming. 
Apt-get is good at resuming upgrades and such if interrupted, but
generally most guys I know plan the 'big' updates and let them run over
night.

But certainly on a dist-upgrade you get the packages from CD instead of
the net.  Its just a matter of changing your sources.list file. :)

> I have, in the past, taken my laptop down to bandersnatch and used
> wget to grab all of the updates for Mandrake. With multiple boxes this
> makes life easier and faster.

If you have more than one Debian machine you can 'cache' your Debian
packages locally for the other machines there are several tools/packages
available for this.  So you can update/upgrade one machine and have it
store/mirror the packages so the rest of your machines can get locally.

In fact, many administrators at 100 plus seat organizations just mirror
entire Debian package repository so all their users dont use any 'net'
bandwidth and instead get locally.

> Any words of advice to make this transition a little smoother? How
> much trouble is it to update a box on-the-quick from source to fix a
> security problem if you aren't willing to wait for a deb package? (ie:
> apache and sshd as recent examples) Can this be done without messing
> up the package management or will I be forced to have a 'mixed system'
> like I have with Redhat and 'drake, or wait for the pkgs?

No harder than any other system.  You would uninstall the package and
install from source instead.  There is a special 'security' source for
sources.list, things like sshd and apache were in debian before things
were publicly announce by a day or so.  Generally if is a 'large'
product and there is a vulnerbility it is in Debian ASAP.  

-Derek