Some way to improve Univention's upgrade speed

UCS - Univention Corporate Server
#1

Good night, I am from Brazil and here in our country access to the official repository of Univention is at least poor, not to mention something worse. I went to update a Univention from 4.4-3 to the newer current version and it is more than 4 hours of update to perform the update from version to version up to the current 4.4-7 the newest currently.

As I have several Univentions in versions 4.4-2, 4.4-3, etc., I would like to know if there is a possibility to copy the packages already downloaded from an updated one and play on another server to save the suffering of downloading the packages and improve a little this update (which was one of the main reasons for abandoning Windows Server).

Thank you in advance for your help.

#2

Hi @tacioandrade,

its a bit of a question “why is it slow?” Is it because of very low download speed of packages? Network latency when updating package sources?

Generally I see multiple options. One is to setup a local package mirror, this is explained in https://docs.software-univention.de/installation-4.4.html#profile:netinstaller:local. Another is to use https://wiki.debian.org/AptCacherNg to just cache the packages that have actually been requested recently.

1 Like
#3

The main problem is the download rate of most providers in Brazil with Germany … I have suffered a lot from that, I have some VPS in Contabo and it only works when I use Cloudflare as a CDN, otherwise the speed of donload is terrible!

Then there is the need for Univention to update from version to version as it was in Windows 7 where it was necessary to apply the KBs in order not to break everything and causes the update to take so long.

If I have how to copy the packages from one Univention to the other, I believe that I can improve and the update time a lot, in Debian I would just copy the packages to /var/cache/apt/archives, but from what I saw, Univention needs files playing in other locations (by the size of the archives folder).

#4

Hi @tacioandrade and thanks for your question.

As @fbartels already pointed out, you’ll need some way of caching the packages locally to reduce download time.

We recommend the configuration of a local package mirror, as described in https://docs.software-univention.de/manual-4.4.html#software::createrepo

Atm, this will pull about 150 GiB (depending on your package selection, e.g. unmaintained enabled). But afterwards all your machines can pull their packages directly from this system.

Sure, you also could copy the packages from var/cache/apt/archives, but this means more work in the long term and only gives you recently updated packages.
If you are at it, also have a look at /var/cache/univention-appcenter/appcenter.software-univention.de/

Greetings to :brazil: and thanks for using UCS

#5

Thank you for the tip! At the moment I believe that the best option is to copy the packages! I have a Univention at OVH Canada, copying its packages and updating the others may end up being the best option at the moment.

In the future, who knows, with a better dollar / euro value, I won’t be able to mount a mirror on this side of the Atlantic, right now it’s complicated.

#6

I went to copy the files via scp from my machine in Canada and I realized that what takes longer is the content of /var/cache/univention-appcenter/appcenter.software-univention.de/ I believe that because there are hundreds of small files the sequential downlaod makes it quite slow.

An option for the next versions is when you see that the UCS is in a very outdated version, receive the files related to the version in a tar.gz file and unzip, this helps and is VERY fast!

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