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+++
title = "Update your mirrors!"
date = 2023-01-29
template = "blog-page.html"
[taxonomies]
tags = [ "foss", "advice" ]
+++
Nah, I'm not talking about [bluetooth mirrors](https://www.bathshack.com/blog/bluetooth-mirrors-everything-you-need-to-know-before-you-buy/). Mirrors are what powers all distros: they're a (de)centralized solution for downloading pre-compiled binaries and scripts for your operating system.
## Suspicion
I like always having the most current version of packages, so I usually update my system several times a day. When, after a day, I ran `sudo pacman -Syu` and it reported the system being up to date, I was pretty weirded out.
Another day passed, and the system was still up to date. It was not a connection problem, I was connecting to my mirrors and they were reporting absolutely zero updates for my system.
## Problem
At the third day of stagnation, I was sure something was up. I looked up the [Mirror Status](https://archlinux.org/mirrors/status/) page on ArchLinux's website and saw that loads of mirrors were out of sync.
I had never touched my mirrorlist before, it was just generated by the [archinstall](https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall) script a few months ago; a lot of Arch-based distros by default ship tools to update your mirrorlist, but I honestly thought I'd never need that.
Pacman's mirrorlist is located in `/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist`. You can filter out uncommented lines with this command:
```
grep -v "^#" /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
```
And check the actual status of your mirror(s) on the Mirror Status page linked above.
## Solution
This will overwrite your mirrorlist, so you're advised to make a backup before proceeding:
```
sudo cp /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.bak
```
I decided to use [reflector](https://xyne.dev/projects/reflector/) to fix this problem. I didn't want to have to deal with this again, so I enabled the provided systemd timer.
First, install it.
```
sudo pacman -S reflector
```
Then, edit `/etc/xdg/reflector/reflector.conf`. I only needed to edit the `--country` parameter and select countries next to the one where I reside; you can list available countries by running `reflector --list-countries`.
```
--save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
--protocol https
--country Italy,Switzerland,France,Germany,Austria
--latest 5
--sort age
```
Finally, start the service and check if it worked.
```
sudo systemctl start reflector.service
cat /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
```
If everything went smoothly, enable reflector's timer so it runs weekly.
```
sudo systemctl enable reflector.timer
```
Done!
Now, by default pacman _does_ update its mirrorlist. It creates a file called `mirrorlist.pacnew` and it expects you to pick your favorite mirrors each time its generated. You can disable this (now unneeded) behavior by uncommenting and setting `NoExtract` in `/etc/pacman.conf`:
```
...
NoExtract = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
# Misc options
Color
ILoveCandy
ParallelDownloads = 3
...
```
|