Installing packages on machines without internet

[lockfile]

I have an in house server box. I plan on using it for backup and some mundane lifting tasks like torrenting (legal files), file processing, and dev mockup box. It has a P4 with 1 GB of ram but it's still pretty snappy even in 2012! Sometimes I run Linux on it and sometimes I run FreeBSD. I'm familiar with both but I'm more adept with the Penguin.

It's a real pain to get new packages on the machine. Especially packages that have plenty of dependencies. Subersion has like 6 deps alone. Apache a couple, forget something like the Nvidia driver for FreeBSD. Even with Debian, to manually download all those deps by hand is a pain. On FreeBSD, it's a little more every now and then since it's binary package system and ports requires more common sense.

My point is it's too much work to add binaries to a computer without internet. How do you/would/plan to do it?

 

[phoenix]

Download the install DVD, then use pkg_add(1) from the mounted DVD to install packages. You won't get the very latest versions, but if you only use what's on the DVD, you won't have to download anything.

 

[Beastie]

What has been your experience with installing packages on machines W/O internet

It's very feasible.

It's a real pain to get new packages on the machine. Especially packages that have plenty of dependencies.

You can first download the "root" applications and use common Unix tools (tar(1), grep(1), awk(1), etc.) to prepare dependency lists (every package has a file called +CONTENTS, look for @pkgdep ... lines).
You can then automate the downloading of these dependency lists on another machine (e.g. wget -i yourlist). You'll have many duplicate dependencies so sort(1) and uniq(1) can also be useful.

Use your imagination...