[BobSongs]

And now, the moment you've been waiting for!

It's time to do a breakdown of the debmirror command.

--nosource
Don't include the source files. This helps reduce the download amount to around half.

-m or --md5sums
This feature slows things down a bit. It's a give and take here. We lose speed but we're ensured of accurate downloads. You can turn this off to speed things up a tiny bit. The man page describes this switch as paranoid and too slow.

--passive
Download in passive mode. I think there are four people in the world who know what this means. If you bump into one they'll let you know, and you'll let me know. In the mean time, I keep it in because it works right with it in there.

--host=archive.ubuntu.com
This is the basic web address where the files we want are located. In this case the whole address is: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ You can surf you way there. You won't find much except...

--root=ubuntu/
The root folder. This folder on archive.ubuntu.com contains the files we're looking for.

--method=ftp
http is slightly faster than the ftp option. The tutorial suggests the file transfer protocol.

--progress
Displays the hashmarks ##### that indicate the download progress. Useful to ensure the downloading is still continuing.

--dist=hardy,hardy-security,hardy-updates,hardy-backports
The distribution. The tutorial will always be based on the latest Long Term Edition. Modify this to meet your distribution's needs.

--section=main,restricted,universe,multiverse
These are the different divisions available. Main, for example, has the main elements of the Ubuntu installation. You won't find restricted software in main.

--arch=i386
The architecture the repository files were designed for. The default is i386, but can be modified for other systems, such as: amd64, hppa, ia64, powerpc or sparc depending on availability.

~/UbuntuRepos
The location where debmirror downloads the remote mirror locally. This can be modifed to any desired folder.

--ignore-release-gpg
This switch stops the command from failing (dropping to a command prompt) if the 'Release.gpg' file is missing.

--timeout=seconds -t 120
Specifies the timeout to use for network operations (either FTP or rsync). Set this to a higher value if you experience failed downloads. Seen here are 120 seconds. (Thanks, Jocose! Jocose was kind enough to offer this clever tidbit after feeling the urge to wander through pages and pages and pages of man files. This nifty feature can be built into your command in case you get a drop out at, say midnight only to discover 8 hours later that you've only got 30 Mb's worth of files and 8 hours wasted. Depending on your drop-out times adjust this number accordingly.)


The chances this stuff's actually useful to you are... well, close to nil. But it was fun researching it all and... as much as I'd like to be on Ubuntu's payroll... I probably won't see a dime. Then again: I'm not too sure how pleased they are that I'm letting everyone know how to download a boat-load of files from their servers.

So happy downloading.