pacredir - redirect pacman requests, assisted by avahi service discovery
By default every Arch Linux installation downloads its package files from online mirrors, transferring all the bits via WAN connection.
But often other Arch systems may be around that already have the files
available on local storage - just a fast LAN connection away. This is
where pacredir can help. It uses Avahi to find
other instances and get the files there if available.
To compile and run pacredir you need:
Arch Linux installs development files for the packages by default, so
no additional development packages are required.
Building and installing is very easy. Just run:
make
followed by:
make install
This will place an executable at /usr/bin/pacredir,
documentation can be found in /usr/share/doc/pacredir/.
Additionally systemd service files are installed to
/usr/lib/systemd/system/ and avahi service files go to
/etc/avahi/services/.
Enable systemd services pacserve and pacredir, open TCP
port 7078 and add the following line to your repository
definitions in pacman.conf:
Include = /etc/pacman.d/pacredir
To get a better idea what happens in the background have a look at the request flow chart.
By default databases are not fetched from cache servers. To make that
happen just add the server twice, additionally as regular server. This
is prepared in /etc/pacman.d/pacredir, just uncomment the corresponding
line.
Do not worry if pacman reports the following after the change:
error: failed retrieving file 'core.db' from 127.0.0.1:7077 : The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found
This is ok, it just tells pacman that pacredir could not find a file
and downloading it from an official server is required.
Please note that pacredir redirects to the most recent database file
found on the local network if it is not too old (currently 24 hours). To
make sure you really do have the latest files run pacman -Syu twice.
There is no security within this project, information and file content
is transferred unencrypted and unverified. Anybody is free to serve
broken and/or malicious files to you, but this is by design. So make
sure pacman is configured to check signatures! It will then detect if
anything goes wrong.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
URL: GitHub.com
Mirror: eworm.de GitLab.com