"June is Bandwidth Conservation Month (well, not officially, but let's say that it is), so if you have multiple machines running an APT-powered Linux distribution such as Debian or Ubuntu, you should take a look at apt-proxy, a utility that caches package downloads in a shared pool for all interested parties on your LAN. This saves you both the time and the bandwidth it costs to download the same updates for more than one computer.
"I was blissfully unaware of apt-proxy myself last week when I was upgrading three Ubuntu machines from 7.10 to 8.04, but the idea of caching the downloaded packages seemed so obvious that I was sure such a utility existed. After familiarizing myself with it I decided to test it out on the next batch of package updates that came down the wire..."
