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Use apt-p2p To Improve Ubuntu 9.04 Upgrade
An anonymous reader writes "With Jaunty Jackalope scheduled for release in 12 days on April 23, this blog posting describes how to switch to apt-p2p in preparation for the upgrade. This should help significantly to reduce the load on the mirrors, smooth out the upgrade experience for all involved, and bypass the numerous problems that have occurred in the past on Ubuntu release day. Remember to disable all third-party repositories beforehand."
The site looks badly outdated. The caveat I would add to your warnings is that the upload speed is uncapped by default. You'll want to limit this unless you want the world to be able to leech you hard. If I left this unlimited my ISP would fucking kill me.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That will help a lot, but you're still going to have a lot to get from the mirrors on a typical system. Odds are, many of the packages in the ISO will be outdated by the time you get it :P I'm running apt-get update on my apt-p2p'd system and so far, so good.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Currently on 8.04, I'll be upgrading to 8.10 sometime after 9.04 is released.
Staying 6 months behind is a reasonable compromise. Let the lab rats (er, enthusiasts!) debug the new stuff first. Last time I checked 8.10 in a VM there was something like 320MB worth of updated packages.
As for the packages themselves, run a local apt proxy like approx, especially if you have more than one Debian or Ubuntu system. It keeps a copy of every .deb you download, and automatically purges the ones that are outdated.
What I like about this is not so much the potentially faster upgrade as the ability to contribute a bit to others. The six-monthly upgrades are are rate enough that I don't mind if they are a bit slow - not that they have been. But I am very conscious that I am using other people's freely given bandwidth and I am pleased to be able to give some back.
Does anybody know if I can force my various machines to cross-peer from each other? If I update one first, I don't want the others searching the Net for peers - they should just copy from the first.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Many primary Linux download sites wind up taking an unreasonable amount of traffic from default setups. If you want to contribute back to the OS's and packages that you find so useful, consider setting up a local mirror to share with the world at large. If you can't justify that, at least consider setting up an internal rsync mirror anytime you have a dozen or more boxes to make updates and downloads much faster for your site, and configure your local machines to point to that local mirror.
This turns out to be especially useful for PXE installaters and cluster setups, for any Linux or other OS. There's nothing like having 100 internal Linux machines all trying to update OpenOffice at the same time from an external primary site, through a corporate DSL line, to ensure that many of the updates will fail.
If it works, why upgrade at all?
Ubuntu 8.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release. It will have any security patches until the next LTS release, which is typically every 18 months. So, why not just wait for 9.10?
ws
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
They are in bed with the RIAA and MPAA, but they give massive bandwidth, and do not block any ports or filter p2p.
So, they're letting you do whatever you want, to make sure they maximize the amount of money they can sue you for?
Me too. Often it's quicker to do a full install from scratch.
That's why my systems always have at least two different partitions: one for "/" and another for "/home". I can reformat my system partition and still have my data intact.
Of course, if you're not using p2p to download copyrighted material, that might not be a problem.
It could be that your uploading is killing your download speed. See one of the other comments for instructions on how to limit upload speed if you hadn't already.
Is it just me or is the fun game of "pick your closest mirror" not very fun at all? Just download the damn thing at best possible speed. I don't care where you get it from.
As if I'm in a position to pick the best site where to download something from. Give me a break. Apologies to the power users who can lick their Ethernet cable and tell which site will have the best download performance and availability.
The person who modded you up obviously misunderstood my comment and/or the situation vis-a-vis updating your system in the same way you did: every package on your system is unlikely to be represented on the alternate install CD, and even some of those which are will be outdated by the time you get the ISO, so you will still be downloading numerous packages from the repositories. I didn't say it wouldn't help. You either didn't read my comment, didn't understand my comment, or don't understand the relationship between the repo on the CD and the live repo.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Upgrades of Linux distributions work much better than Windows distributions because of the library structure and package dependancy system.
If you try to upgrade a library on Linux to a new version that cannot coexist with a previous version that other apps depend on, the new package will be set up so that it tells you it needs to remove the old library and its dependent apps if you really want to proceed.
There's also not going to be a lot of garbage hanging around in a "registry". If a package doesn't work because of settings, they're easily removed from /etc (or a '.' directory in your home directory, for personal settings) and can in no way be harming unrelated apps.
On Windows.... I agree that clean installs are the better policy.
In any case, even if somebody could produce a file that matched the checksum, you would have to download the entire file from that one source, as any discrepancies in the data would produce an incorrect checksum. Typically with p2p (though I'm not sure of apt-p2p's particular method), you are downloading from multiple sources, and it's unlikely that they would all have that file unless they themselves were downloading it only from that one source.
No existe.