DeveloperWiki:NewMirrors

Adding a new mirror

This should outline the process of adding a new mirror for PacBSD packages.

Mirror Scheme

Currently PacBSD has a single tier system, meaning that all mirrors sync back to a single point. As the list of available mirrors grow we will move to a multi-tier system to increase the number of sync points and distribute the load. it is currently not decided on the number of tiers will be implemented, nor are the requirements for these tiers defined. There is also no current idea on how current mirrors will be assigned to a certain tier when/if this point is reached.

Mirror Administrator Side

Mirror Requirements

• Disk space: >= 20 GB
• Sync off PacBSD server with rsync
• 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
• http/https support

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

Note: We are not accepting FTP mirrors, only http/https mirrors that optionally exposes rsync as well to allow others to sync off it

Go to https://github.com/PacBSD/pacweb/issues and create a new issue with the New:Mirror label with 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)
• Sync ISOs (yes/no)
• Path to lastupdate file (if other than http(s)://mirror.domainname.tld/.../lastupdate)

Contact info

If you want to reach the PacBSD staff for questions, you can either reach out to us on #pacbsd-chat on FreeNode or you can open a bug report on our tracker

PacBSD Side

• Add mirror to PacBSD main site
• Regenerate pacman-mirrorlist package with updated list