@ Chris Wellons:

Nice. This is a great idea. Now I just need to dig out some piece of hardware (or virtual relestate) on which I can set it up, and wrangle an IP away from the ever stingy network dudes. :P

[…] http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2013/11/20/super-lazy-provis ioning-with-vagrant/ […]

If you’re going to be grabbing the same .deb packages a bunch of times I strongly recommend setting up an Apt-Cacher NG server on your network. It’s effectively a fully-up-to-date local mirror where any particular package+version is only ever fetched over the Internet once, lazily. I run one at work where it’s used by a number of people, one of whom uses it to update his dozens of VMs (I think using Puppet). Sharing it is a nice benefit to me because packages tend to already be cached by the time I need them.

As you’ve probably already seen, I’ve been using live-build to reasonably capture system configuration, allowing for fresh images to be built efficiently on demand. It probably wouldn’t work well for your particular scenario here since live-build can only make live systems, practically read-only, at the moment.