I have set up a mirror of repo.chimeralinux.org on a server in Australia (Brisbane). It’s been running well for a couple of weeks now. The root of the mirror shows an index of what is hosted and when it was last synced. /chimera is where the Chimera data lives.
It mirrors the packages as well as ISO and rootfs downloads. Using the mirror
greatly speeds up package downloads, which in-turn makes things like apk upgrade a lot faster. Some rudimentary testing suggests this this server may
also provide a speed improvement for folks in parts of Asia too.
How to Use the Mirror
Packages
Edit the files in /etc/apk/repositories.d/ to point to the mirror. For example
/etc/apk/repositories.d/00-repo-main.list contains this by default:
https://repo.chimera-linux.org/current/main
Change that to:
https://au.mirror.7bit.org/chimera/current/main
I.e. replace repo.chimera-linux.org with au.mirror.7bit.org/chimera.
Downloads
For ISOs and rootfs images visit: https://au.mirror.7bit.org/chimera/live/latest/.
Building and Running the Mirror
I set up a new server with BinaryLane in Brisbane and installed Chimera Linux
on it—yes the mirror is hosted with Chimera. Specifically I installed the
base-minimal package set to keep the package count low. On top of that I
installed nginx to serve the data and Lego (which I added to cports) to
manage TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt.
To limit access and avoid the use of root there are dedicated regular users
for syncing, lego, nginx, and www-data. To allow lego to restart
nginx when certificates are updated I use a doas rule.
Synchronisation is triggered hourly by a cron job. I use the atomic-rsync
script to make updates atomic. The script manages a pair of directories
chimera-1 and chimera-2. The active one is symlinked to chimera. The
script syncs into the inactive directory, creating hard links for unchanged
data, then flips the symlink at the end.
After syncing, the current date is written to a file, which is used by a small snippet of JavaScript on the index page to show when the data was last synced.