[SoCoSA/discuss] suggestions - offline network

[Sean]

I may have the opportunity soon to upgrade a network for a medical
clinic and two small schools in Vietnam, and I wanted to run by you
all what I was planning on doing. If you have any suggestions on what
else to do, or what to do differently, I would appreciate it. I've
never thought of doing something like this before, and I am still
doing some research.

I am going to be working over the next few weeks to put together a
custom Ubuntu (gnome) install for their language (I'm told that they
know English rather well, so would it be better to keep it english?),
county, and perhaps include some additional packages.

I will also be putting together a network server to be used as an
offline repository (not yet sure if I'll have to include both x86 and
adm64 packages, but it might be a good idea to do both anyway). There
is a large city about 15 miles away where they can grab updated
packages via -apt-mirror and use that system to update the offline
repository packages. I've considered the possibility of using aptoncd,
but I'm not sure that would be a good long-term solution.

The best way I can think to do this is have a laptop with an external
hard drive be a mirror that is updated quarterly or yearly during a
trip to the city. The laptop would come back to the network and copy
the files to the offline repository, and the systems would be able to
update their packages via that server. I've read that the total
repository size over 30GB, but that sounds far too small to me.

Most or all of the equipment would be purchased over there. I'm not
yet sure if it will be practical to set up a wired network, so I might
have to go wireless. Any ideas or suggestions for me?