DeveloperWiki:NewMirrors
Contents
Adding a new mirror
This text should outline the procedure for adding a new mirror for Arch packages.
2-tier mirroring scheme
Due to the high load and bandwidth limits Arch Linux uses 2-tier mirroring scheme.
There are few tier 1 mirrors that sync directly from archlinux.org every hour.
All other mirrors should sync from one of tier 1 mirrors. Syncing from archlinux.org is not allowed.
For the mirror administrator
Tier 2 requirements
- Disk-space >= 60 GB
- Sync off a tier 1 mirror (see https://archlinux.org/mirrors)
- Sync all contents of the upstream mirror (i.e. do not sync only some repositories)
- Do not sync more often than every hour, but you should sync at least once a day
- Sync on a random minute so it is more likely the requests will be spaced out with other mirrors
- Use the following rsync options: -rtlvH --delete-after --delay-updates --safe-links
- If you ever wish to send downtime notifications to our users, please use the arch-mirrors-announce list. You do not need to subscribe to be able to post.
- http support
Tier 1 requirements
- Tier 2 requirements
- Bandwidth >= 100Mbit/s
- rsync support
- Proven reliability (be a tier 2 mirror for a while and have reasonable uptime, response to out-of-sync notifications etc.)
You can use rsync directly or this script as a starting point. Please note that the script tries to minimize load and bandwidth used (about 5MiB as of 2014-01-21) in case there are no changes. Feel free to remove this check if you don't sync very often or your upstream mirror does not provide the lastupdate file.
Create a feature-request
Go to https://bugs.archlinux.org and create a feature-request (category: mirrors) containing the following information:
- Mirror domain name
- Geographical location of the mirror (country)
- URLs for supported access methods (http(s), rsync) (no ftp)
- Your mirror's available bandwidth
- An administrative contact email
- An alternative administrative contact email (optional)
- (tier 1 mirrors) Rsync IPs so your server(s) can be allowed to sync off tier 0 (rsync.archlinux.org)
- (tier 2 mirrors) The name of tier 1 mirror you are syncing from. You can find available tier 1 mirrors here (sort using the tier column)
Contact info and mailing lists
Feel free to join the arch-mirrors mailing list which can be used for general discussion about our mirrors. If you want to inform our users about downtime of your mirror please use the arch-mirrors-announce mailing list. You do not need to subscribe to be able to post to arch-mirrors-announce.
If you want to reach the Arch Linux staff for questions, you can either use the arch-mirrors list, you can open a bug report on our tracker or you can send a mail to mirrors@archlinux.org.
The Arch Linux side
- Add the mirror info to the Django admin site
- Regenerate the rsync whitelist with the gen_rsyncd.conf.pl script - only for tier 1 mirrors, or when disabling access to a previously untiered mirror (also done by an hourly cronjob)
- Regenerate the pacman-mirrorlist package
Mirror size
To give you an impression how much space will be needed for a mirror here are some numbers (as of 2015-01-21):
Mandatory:
- pool (all packages) - 41GB
- repositories (core, community, extra, testing, gnome-unstable, kde-unstable, multilib) - total ~200MB
Optional:
- iso - 7GB (encouraged)
- archive - 15GB (permanently frozen)
- other - 9GB
- sources - 28GB
Most mirrors do not sync archive, other and sources directories, but sync everything else (including temporary repositories), so usually you will need about 50GB reserved for Arch Linux mirror.