Moved from approx to apt-cacher-ng

I have been a long-time user of approx, I got used to it and knew how to configure it so all my machines + VMs used the same cache and saved me a lot of bandwidth.

But that was when I got a stable connection at >100KiB/s in a daily-basis. Now I'm with a mobile connection at <30KiB/s and sometimes is intermittent, so approx started giving me a lot of headaches.

When approx tries to connect a host that can't be resolved its domain name, then gets 404. How does that reflects in the /pool? Well, you get a file touch'd and 0 bytes size. When you try again, approx will find the same file with 0 bytes size and will gives you again a 404, even if you can now resolve the name address of that domain. And as I like to use what I know, then I made a workaround: Each time this happened I ran:

`# find /var/cache/approx -size 0 | xargs rm`

So next time I requested a file to approx it tried to connect to the host. But I got tired.

I installed apt-cacher-ng, tweaked a bit /etc/apt-cacher-ng/acng.conf so it uses port 9999 and the cache dir redirects to the same cache than approx and done. apt-cacher-ng returns 503 when it can't connect to the peer, even tries to several repositories with only a line in /etc/apt/sources.list in my clients. It makes me happy and keeps saving me a lot more of bandwidth than approx.

Any comment goes best to my twitter here.