Hello everyone! This is my first post here and great distro to learn arch and all the tools from arch.
I migrated few days ago from ubuntu 19.10 because my late-late upgrade to 20.04 LTS broke my linux-installation. I have once installed arch to virtual box (very minimal and hard to use) so i have little basic understanding.Still newbie.
Perhaps offtopic but because dev said that reflecor-auto is not supported until end of year I tried and tried to understand reflector from arch repos. Man pages were first very confusing and hard to understand. I finally used these options in my
Just came across this thread today! Normally I just open up reflector-simple every so often (maybe like 1-2 times a month?) to update the mirrorlist. If I can set it and forget it with reflector-auto, then I’m all for trying that out. Now I haven’t done anything explicitly yet since I would like to make sure what I’m doing is verified by someone else first before I go ahead and save everything. On my system I already have reflector and reflector-simplepackages installed. I’ve used the following command:
sudo nano /etc/xdg/reflector/reflector.conf
and my edited file looks like the following below. Note, I am in the US, so if anyone can just make sure I did this all correctly, I’ll go ahead and save it and then run sudo systemctl enable --now reflector.timer to allow this to run each week so I don’t have to worry or think about it anymore
GNU nano 5.8 /etc/xdg/reflector/reflector.conf
#
# See "reflector --help" for details.
# Recommended Options
# Set the output path where the mirrorlist will be saved (--save).
--save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
# Select the transfer protocol (--protocol).
--protocol https
# Select the country (--country).
# Consult the list of available countries with "reflector --list-countries" and
# select the countries nearest to you or the ones that you trust. For example:
--country US
# Use only the most recently synchronized mirrors (--latest).
--latest 10 (default was 5, I changed it to 10, but should it be 20 maybe?--this message will be deleted before I save this file, fyi--)
# Sort the mirrors by synchronization time (--sort).
--sort age
Basically I just want to do what reflector-simple does, but automatically. The comment above me @blahnik added a few other values, i.e. sort rate, age 4, completion-percent 100, score 30, and I’m wondering also if I should or need to include any of those? Any additional help or pointing me in the right direction would be most appreciated, thank you!
Edit: Side note, I know this topic is from last year, so I don’t know at all if it still applies and is relevant now or if maybe I should just ignore it all, please let me know, thanks.
Age means how recently the mirror has been updated (smaller is better)
Fetch-time measures the speed (smaller is better)
This list shows that some mirrors are well updated, and some are not.
After this introduction, I’d like to suggest the options to use:
--save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
--protocol https
--latest 5
--sort rate
--country US
You can of course try that with command:
reflector --protocol https --latest 5 --sort rate --country US
and see the result (it doesn’t change any file). And please compare your result with the list above!
Note that mirrors will be updated constantly but not at the same time. This will create variations in ranking.
That’s why I wouldn’t recommend a bigger number for --latest.
Adding --age 2 looks like being a good idea too, but it may also cause an empty mirrorlist…
So this is my suggestion and some reasoning. Feel free to disagree and change values and options. As said, I’m not ranking in the US, so your results might be different.
Maybe…
I actually do not know US mirrors that much, the only information I have is by using these interesting little programs.
Anyway, your list looks good except the square-r00t thingy.
But if needed, that can be removed by a script after running reflector.
So with small tricks it can be made work a bit better.
When I check out https://archlinux.org/mirrors/status/ and I search for the " arch.mirror.square-r00t.net" mirror which you mentioned wasn’t recently updated, but according to the mirror status link from above it’s at 100% or am I not understanding any of this?
@manuel I don’t know if maybe this could shed some light on some things, but this is what my current /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist file looks like:
GNU nano 5.8 /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
################################################################################
################# Arch Linux mirrorlist generated by Reflector #################
################################################################################
# With: reflector --verbose -c US --protocol https --sort rate --latest 10
# When: 2021-07-31 19:58:57 UTC
# From: https://archlinux.org/mirrors/status/json/
# Retrieved: 2021-07-31 19:57:54 UTC
# Last Check: 2021-07-31 18:46:08 UTC
## United States
Server = https://mirror.hackingand.coffee/arch/$repo/os/$arch
## United States
Server = https://mirror.lty.me/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
## United States
Server = https://arlm.tyzoid.com/$repo/os/$arch
## United States
Server = https://mirrors.rit.edu/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
## United States
Server = https://mirrors.lug.mtu.edu/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
## United States
Server = https://archmirror1.octyl.net/$repo/os/$arch
## United States
Server = https://america.mirror.pkgbuild.com/$repo/os/$arch
## United States
Server = https://mirrors.xtom.com/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
## United States
Server = https://arch.mirror.constant.com/$repo/os/$arch
## United States
Server = https://mirrors.ocf.berkeley.edu/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch
Edit: 9 out of 10 of those mirrors look good at 100% completion as shown on https://archlinux.org/mirrors/status/
The only mirror that was at 91% was the mirrors.xtom.com/archlinux/
Not sure if I should maybe just re-run reflector-simple since this file was created on 2021-07-31 to perhaps refresh this mirror list. I may be looking into this way too much
Edit 2: is there a way to auto run reflector-simple once a week?
Not sure what I did, but there were a few package updates, so I ran yay -Syu and got the following errors, any thoughts?
[scott@endeavourOS ~]$ yay -Syu
[sudo] password for scott:
:: Synchronizing package databases...
core is up to date
extra is up to date
community is up to date
multilib is up to date
endeavouros is up to date
:: Starting full system upgrade...
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...
Package (5) Old Version New Version Net Change Download Size
community/gtkd 3.9.0-12 3.9.0-13 -0.51 MiB 4.48 MiB
community/hwinfo 21.75-1 21.76-1 0.00 MiB 0.96 MiB
community/liblphobos 2:1.26.0-4 2:1.27.0-1 3.54 MiB 12.28 MiB
extra/re2 1:20210601-1 1:20210801-1 0.00 MiB 0.17 MiB
community/tilix 1.9.4-3 1.9.4-4 0.07 MiB 0.92 MiB
Total Download Size: 18.82 MiB
Total Installed Size: 129.60 MiB
Net Upgrade Size: 3.11 MiB
:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]
:: Retrieving packages...
re2-1:20210801-1... 173.1 KiB 30.3 KiB/s 00:06 [-----------------------] 100%
gtkd-3.9.0-13-x86_64 4.5 MiB 790 KiB/s 00:06 [-----------------------] 100%
tilix-1.9.4-4-x86_64 946.3 KiB 97.5 KiB/s 00:10 [-----------------------] 100%
liblphobos-2:1.2... 12.3 MiB 1204 KiB/s 00:10 [-----------------------] 100%
hwinfo-21.76-1-x... 985.8 KiB 92.3 KiB/s 00:11 [-----------------------] 100%
Total (5/5) 18.8 MiB 1775 KiB/s 00:11 [-----------------------] 100%
error: failed retrieving file 'liblphobos-2:1.27.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst' from arch.mirror.square-r00t.net : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'gtkd-3.9.0-13-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst' from arch.mirror.square-r00t.net : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'hwinfo-21.76-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst' from arch.mirror.square-r00t.net : The requested URL returned error: 404
warning: too many errors from arch.mirror.square-r00t.net, skipping for the remainder of this transaction
error: failed retrieving file 're2-1:20210801-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst' from arch.mirror.square-r00t.net : The requested URL returned error: 404
error: failed retrieving file 'tilix-1.9.4-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst' from arch.mirror.square-r00t.net : The requested URL returned error: 404
(5/5) checking keys in keyring [-----------------------] 100%
(5/5) checking package integrity [-----------------------] 100%
(5/5) loading package files [-----------------------] 100%
(5/5) checking for file conflicts [-----------------------] 100%
(5/5) checking available disk space [-----------------------] 100%
:: Processing package changes...
(1/5) upgrading liblphobos [-----------------------] 100%
(2/5) upgrading gtkd [-----------------------] 100%
(3/5) upgrading hwinfo [-----------------------] 100%
(4/5) upgrading re2 [-----------------------] 100%
(5/5) upgrading tilix [-----------------------] 100%
:: Running post-transaction hooks...
(1/4) Arming ConditionNeedsUpdate...
(2/4) Compiling GSettings XML schema files...
(3/4) Updating icon theme caches...
(4/4) Updating the desktop file MIME type cache...
:: Searching databases for updates...
:: Searching AUR for updates...
there is nothing to do
I run this ~3 months or whenever I remember. Don’t forget to -Syyu when done. No need for anything more, and if I forget the command (I always do - I just check /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and copy/paste). No need to setup something that runs hourly/daily whatever IMO. I mean, I guess I’ve just never had that much of an issue. Maybe other parts of the world mirrors go down regularly, but here in Southern California USA, it’s not really an issue.
