Your Debian mirror is all set up and ready to go to work, and your clients are all prepared: you have your CD-ROM or USB installation boot media (see Recipe 16.8) all set up and ready to go. How do you tell them to use your local Debian mirror?
Start up your systems with your installation boot media. Go through the usual keyboard, language, and network configuration screens. When you get to the Mirror Country screen, as Figure 16-3 shows, select "enter information manually." Then, enter the hostname of your server, like cracker.alrac.net; and then on the next screen, enter the archive directory, which is /debian/. Continue the rest of the installation in the usual manner.
This is all very nice and not that hard to set up, but you really want to know how to customize and automate your Debian installations. See the next recipe to learn how to do this with a preseed file.
Debian releases, manuals, and downloads: http://www.debian.org/releases/