University IT (UIT) maintains two separate Debian repositories to supplement the repositories provided by the Debian project.
The debian-stanford and debian-local repositories
The repository debian-stanford is open to the world and contains Stanford-local or Stanford-specific software builds that may be of interest to the general Stanford community. The repository debian-local contains additional packages and software for use internally within UIT; access to the debian-local repository is restricted to Stanford networks. The two repositories are kept separate so that access controls can be applied to debian-local without affecting debian-stanford.
Configuring Debian server access
(In the code below replace "DISTRO" with the appropriate Debian release name, e.g., "bullseye" or "bookworm".)
For server access to the debian-stanford repository add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://debian.stanford.edu/debian-stanford DISTRO main contrib non-free deb-src http://debian.stanford.edu/debian-stanford DISTRO main contrib non-free
For server access to the debian-local repository add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://debian.stanford.edu/debian-local DISTRO main contrib non-free deb-src http://debian.stanford.edu/debian-local DISTRO main contrib non-free
Where they exist
Both repositories exist on debian.stanford.edu and are managed via reprepro, an archive management package provided with Debian. Both are signed with the same GnuPG key, which can be installed into apt's keyring by installing the Debian package stanford-keyring.
How they are divided
Repositories are divided into one or more distributions, usually identified either by the keywords unstable, testing, stable, or oldstable, or by the code name (such as jessie or stretch). The former change over time as new versions of Debian are released. The latter uniquely identify one Debian release. (sid is the code name for the unstable distribution, which never releases but contributes to each release.) In general, both can be used interchangeably, but the keywords like stable stable or unstableunstable must always be used in changelog files and *.changes files.
The debian-stanford repository also contains the stretch-backports distribution to make available backports of software from newer releases that won't be picked up by default. Following the practice of backports.debian.org, they're always referred to using those names, not the stable or oldstable names.
