# Pacserve

Pacserve allows to easily share pacman packages between computers. This is very useful, if you have a slow internet connection, but multiple machines running Arch Linux.

## Installation

You can either install pacserveAUR manually from the AUR, or from one of the xyne-any, xyne-x86_64 or xyne-i686 unofficial repositories.

Finally start/enable `pacserve.service`.

In case you use iptables, you will probably want to start `pacserve-ports.service` too.

## Standalone usage

Instead of pacman, use the pacsrv wrapper to perform an update, install packages and so on. It will automatically download all packages from the LAN, if someone hosts them with pacserve there. Otherwise it will just download them from the internet mirrors, as usually. For example:

    # pacsrv -Syu
    # pacsrv -S openssh

## Configure Pacman to use Pacserve

If you are always running the pacserve daemon and want pacman to use it without the wrapper, add the following line below each repository in /etc/pacman.conf:

     Include = /etc/pacman.d/pacserve

Here is an example for the Xyne repository:

    /etc/pacman.conf

    ...
    [xyne-x86_64]
    SigLevel = Required
    Include  = /etc/pacman.d/pacserve
    Server   = http://xyne.archlinux.ca/repos/xyne
    ...

Alternatively (for official mirrors only), you may insert the Include...-line at the top of the Pacman mirrorlist file or let pacman.conf-insert_pacserve generate a pacman.conf file for you.

## Troubleshooting

### Problems if using external downloaders in pacman.conf

If you are using an external downloader such as wget, pacsrv may return errors when downloading. To work around these errors, simply quote the url and output formatting strings (`%u` resp. `%o`) using single quotes:

    XferCommand = /usr/bin/wget --timeout=6 --passive-ftp -c -O '%o' '%u'

Categories:

- Package management
- Networking