Mirrors

As a user of distri, please use the default repository at https://repo.distr1.org/.

If you are interested in contributing to the project by providing a mirror server, the rest of this document is for you!

distri

The distri research linux distribution project was started in 2019 to research whether a few architectural changes could enable drastically faster package management.

While the package managers in common Linux distributions (e.g. apt, dnf, …) top out at data rates of only a few MB/s, distri effortlessly saturates 1 Gbit, 10 Gbit and even 40 Gbit connections, resulting in superior installation and update speeds.

You can read more about distri starting in my introduction blog post, then in my series of blog posts about distri.

Why run a mirror?

Currently, the distri project only has servers in Europe, so our geographic proximity to the rest of the world is pretty poor. See the First Byte results as reported on https://performance.sucuri.net/domain/repo.distr1.org:

If you are interested in contributing to the project and have the continued means to run a mirror, preferably in areas not yet well-covered, that would be much appreciated! Users in more parts of the world will be able to experience how fast package management can be, and your mirror can play a big role in that!

Mirror requirements

Please connect your mirror to the internet with a connection speed of at least 1 Gbit/s.
Please allocate at least 150 GiB of disk space for the distri mirror: the two most recent distri releases use 66 GiB and 26 GiB, respectively. We want to be able to serve at least the two most recent distri release from all mirrors.
Please synchronize your mirror at least every 24 hours with the distri repository at https://repo.distr1.org/, e.g. by using the following rsync invocation in a daily cronjob:
```
rsync -av rsync://repo-rsync.distr1.org/distri /srv/repo.distr1.org/distri
```
Note: repo-rsync.distr1.org only allows access for explicitly allowed IPv4 or IPv6 addresses or ranges. Please get in touch if you are interested to run a mirror! Reach out to Michael Stapelberg via email.

Please ensure your web server supports Accept-Encoding: zstd, gzip for transparent zstandard transport compression:

curl -v \
  --header 'Accept-Encoding: zstd, gzip' \
  --connect-to repo.distr1.org:80:chuchi:80 \
  http://repo.distr1.org/distri/supersilverhaze/pkg/i3status-amd64-2.13-10.squashfs \
  -o /dev/null |& grep Content-Encoding
< Content-Encoding: zstd

When using nginx, build the external zstd-nginx-module and set zstd_static on and gzip_static on.

Monitoring freshness

If you would like to monitor freshness of your mirror, you can use the /_mirror/last-sync-from/repo-rsync.distr1.org file. It contains a UNIX timestamp (date +%s) and is updated every minute.

Any questions?

Please get in touch! Reach out to Michael Stapelberg via email.