Something mysterious is happening to the popular Linux distro's website. Here's what we know so far.
  • CubitOom@infosec.pubEnglish
    12·
    24 days ago

    In the meantime, if you’re an Arch user and if archlinux.org is unavailable, you should use the mirrors already in your pacman-mirrorlist package instead of relying on the reflector tool.

    I’m not too knowledgeable here, but why couldn’t you use the reflector to generate a mirrorlist?

    I normally do something like

    sudo reflector --verbose -c CA --protocol https --sort rate --latest 20 --download-timeout 5 --threads 5 --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

    Which my understanding is that it would test all the mirrors in CA (Canada) and sort the fastest ones and then overwrite the mirrorlist.

    • CubitOom@infosec.pubEnglish
      16·
      24 days ago

      Oh wait, I think the point is that if you are trying to visit archlinux.org, then you can use the URLs in the mirrorlist instead. That part about the reflector tool threw me.

      Guess I’m lucky, I haven’t had any issues downloading ISOs or using the AUR. This is the first I’m hearing about the DDOS.

      • ISO@lemmy.zip
        10·
        24 days ago

        reflector uses https://archlinux.org/mirrors/status/json/ to get mirror status info, and caches it under ~/.cache/Reflector/. So as long as that end-point works, reflector should work.

        I just grabbed a copy and pasted it at http://0x0.st/Ki3Y.json.

        Anyone can grab that JSON data and use file:// URLs so they are never out. e.g.

        curl -L https://archlinux.org/mirrors/status/json/ > /tmp/mirror_status.json
# or if down, use pasted json
curl -L http://0x0.st/Ki3Y.json > /tmp/mirror_status.json
# and then
reflector --url file:///tmp/mirror_status.json ...

        But, as you noted, this has been mostly a nothing-burger from a user perspective anyway. Other than the homepage being unavailable on occasion, everything else has been mostly available just fine as you can see from https://status.archlinux.org/.

        I didn’t notice https://gitlab.archlinux.org/ going down either.

        BTW, and as a general rule of thumb, NEVER take specific technical advice from these editors. They don’t actually know much, and this is me trying to be nice.

        Take for example:

        For AUR disruptions, it’s a bit of a pain if you’re not a regular git user, but you cloned packages directly from the GitHub Arch Linux mirror. To do this, use the command:

        See that link ;) At least he got the command below it correctly, somehow.