[nzlug] Ubuntu Update Rate / Size etc

[Mark Foster]

Interested to know what people think...

Running Ubuntu Hardy on one of my boxes at home on a fulltime basis is a
relatively new move for me, and for the most part I can use it fully -
there are sadly a few Windows-only systems I must access for which I fire
up ye ol' Laptop.

Noted though in terms of keeping Ubuntu up to date, that this week alone
ive had well over 100MB of updates to do.  In fact I would go so far to
say that several hundred MB of updates appear to be on the cards every
month.

Anyone got any perspective as to whether this is considered 'a good thing'
or not - or whether this is even normal?   Certainly seems that a fair
percentage of some of the relatively small bandwidth caps on offer in NZ
could be absorbed just by keeping up to date in OS terms (seems an
unreasonable use of bandwidth in the great scheme of things).

Anyone got much experience running a local updates server on their LAN to
service multiple systems?  Does said system need to field copies of
_every_ update or can it somehow be smart about this and only download
updates of packages known to be installed on LAN machines?

Mark.