Billy ONeal's questions

I have some music files I'd like to listen to sitting on a Samba share. I added this share via the Ubuntu GUI (Places -> Connect to server...), and everything worked just fine.

However, despite the fact that my music file is playing from this location, after I've not touched the location using the Nautilus GUI, Ubuntu/GNOME decides that I'm not using the share anymore and terminates the connection. Thus, my music stops playing and Rhythmbox is unhappy with me. Simply clicking on the new shortcut the "Connect to server..." bit created for me immediately makes the files come back again and allows me to restart the music playing.

How can I have Ubuntu not automatically dismount samba shares?

I am a student at Case Western Reserve University, and the bandwidth from the Ubuntu servers to my location is often horrendously bad (on the order of a few hundred bytes per second). Myself and a few friends would like to be able to download the packages once, and have them cached for the rest of our Ubuntu installations on campus. To do that, we would either need to setup our own APT repositories, or setup some form of caching (squid?) server at which we could point our systems.

Is setting up such a mirror a difficult process? How would one accomplish it?

sysfs makes perfect sense -- it represents the system, and is mounted under /dev. procfs, which gets mounted to /proc, is much more nebulous however. What are procfs & /proc used for?