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So you'd like to keep a local copy of the Slackware FTP site on your local
machine? You will need a few things before you can do that. You'll need
a copy of the rsync program. It's available in the rsync.tgz package, in
the N series. You'll also need a good amount of disk space. If you
only want to mirror one particular release, you will need between one and
two gigs of disk space. If you want to mirror everything, you're going to
need at least ten gigs. Also, you'll need a network connection of some
reasonable speed. It doesn't need to be ultra-fast, but a 33.6 modem is
probably going to be painful.
First, you'll want to make a place on your machine to store the distribution
tree. For the purpose of this example, we will assume that you want the
root of your local copies to be /dest. That means that if you wanted to
sync down the Alpha port, it would be in /dest/alpha. Or if you wanted
to sync down the Slackware-4.0 release, it would be in /dest/slackware-4.0.
Now, let's see what's available for rsyncing on sourceforge. cd into your
destination directory and type:
rsync download.sourceforge.net::
This will give you a listing of all the modules that are available. Among
these, you will see "slackware" listed. That's the module you are interested
in. If you now run rsync like so:
rsync download.sourceforge.net::slackware
You will see a listing of all the directories on the Slackware FTP site.
Chances are you do not want to mirror the entire site, as that would take
up a whole lot of disk. Let's assume that you just wanted to keep a local
copy of the Alpha port. You would do that with the following rsync
command line (it's a single command line, even if your browser shows it as
two):
rsync --progress --delete -lprtvvz download.sourceforge.net:slackware/alpha .
Note the trailing period - that's important. That command line will tell
rsync to pull down the entire /slackware/alpha directory from the FTP site
and put it into the current directory. That's why you change to /dest first.
You could also specify a directory to put it into if you'd like.
So what about all those options? --progress is fairly straightforward.
--delete tells rsync to remove things from the local copy that have been
removed. That helps to keep your copy identical to the main site, instead
of just leaving everything around that we have removed. -vv means very
verbose. It's not strictly required, but you might enjoy watching what's
happening. -z enables compression, which will make things go a little faster.
And finally, -lprt preserves symlinks, permissions and ownerships, and
timestamps. The -t is especially important.
If you wanted to get the -current tree for Intel, all you would have to do
is replace "/alpha" on the previous command with "/slackware-current". That
part after the module name can be any valid path on the Slackware FTP site.
If you wanted to keep the entire site mirrored locally, you could just leave
off the firectory entirely.
The first time you rsync from the FTP site, it will take a long time to
copy everything over. However, every time after that, all you will get is
whatever has changed since last time you ran rsync. Unless we've made some
major changes, that shouldn't be too much stuff. You could even place your
favorite rsync command into a crontab to keep things updated automatically.
So what can you do with everything now that you've got a local copy? Well,
you've got the source and build scripts that we use. So you could build
packages from source if that's what you are into. You've also got all the
packages, so you could upgrade and install things onto your system from
the local copy. You could use it to make ISO images for burning to CD, or
as an NFS server for doing installs onto other machines. What I'm trying
to say is that a local copy of the FTP site can be incredibly useful.
Also, check out the rsync man page. It has a whole lot more options than
have been explained here. You might find some of them useful.
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