Debian Jigdo mini-HOWTO
Copyright © 2001 Peter Jay Salzman
2005-12-05 ver 1.8
Abstract
Getting Debian ISOs has always been a painful, slow and supremely inefficient process. Jigdo is a tool for distributing and obtaining Debian ISOs in an easy, fast and very efficient manner. This HOWTO describes why you should use jigdo, a little bit about how it works and how you use it to get and update Debian ISOs.
Jigdo is a very general tool, and isn't tied specifically to Debian ISOs. The jigdo tools can be used to make any ISO available for download in the same easy, fast and efficient manner they're used for Debian ISOs. This HOWTO will cover this as well, but we'll focus primarily on downloading Debian ISOs.
7.4. Resources
This HOWTO is winding down to a close, but I thought I'd leave you with a few links and references to learn more about the jigdo tools and how they work.
http://www.debian.org/CD/jigdo-cd/
Downloading Debian CD images with jigdo
Jigsaw Download, or short jigdo, is intended to be the main way of distributing Debian CD images in the future. Currently, the system works, but is not yet very comfortable to use because the download manager application is not finished.
Because it is faster! For various reasons, there are far fewer mirrors for CD images than there are for the "normal" Debian archive. Consequently, if you download from a CD image mirror, that mirror will not only be further away from you, it will also be overloaded, especially just after a release.
Furthermore, some types of images are not available as full .iso downloads because there is not enough space on our servers to host them.
Of course, a "normal" Debian mirror does not carry any CD images, so how can jigdo download them there? jigdo achieves this by downloading individually all the files that are on the CD. In the next step, all these files are assembled in one big file which is an exact copy of the CD image. However, all this happens behind the scenes - all that you need to do is tell the download tool the location of a ".jigdo" file to process.
More information is available from the jigdo homepage. Volunteers willing to help with jigdo development are always welcome!
The jigdo-mirror script is distributed in the scripts directory of the source archive and also in the jigdo-bin-x.y.z.tar.bz2 binary archive.
Name
jigdo-mirror -- Maintain a mirror of images offered with jigdo
Synopsis
jigdo-mirror [config-file]
DESCRIPTION
See jigdo-file(1) for an introduction to Jigsaw Download.
jigdo-mirror is a script intended for people who want to offer direct HTTP or FTP downloads of files for which only the jigdo and template files are available.
As the first step of using jigdo-mirror, you need to set up normal HTTP/FTP/rsync mirroring both of the `.jigdo'/`.template' files and of the parts that are needed for the reconstruction of the images. For example, in the case that you want to mirror Debian CD images with jigdo-mirror, you need a mirror of the `.jigdo'/`.template' files and a Debian mirror on the local machine.
At regular intervals (preferably immediately after the normal mirroring has finished), schedule a run of jigdo-mirror. It will search through a given directory for any `.jigdo' files and attempt to create all images offered by each file.
The script requires you to set a number of variables - please refer to the start of /usr/bin/jigdo-mirror for a description of each of them. Since /usr/bin/jigdo-mirror will be overwritten whenever you upgrade jigdo-mirror, it is highly recommended not to change the settings directly in this script. Instead, personal settings should be saved in a file called .jigdo-mirror in your home directory, or in a different file whose name is then passed to the script as its first (and only) command line argument.
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