xbps shared cache
The simplest answer is always better.
Caching packages is a problem with many solutions, there’s apt-cacher-ng which is built specifically to solve this issue, but I couldn’t get it to work for xbps and promptly gave up.
I then configured a Varnish server and pointed all of my computers mirrorlists to it.
This worked okay, but the cache didn’t survive reboots, and I had to write some VCL to always fetch specific files (the repo database).
VCL isn’t so bad, this is what I came up with:
backend default {
.host = "ftp.swin.edu.au";
.port = "80";
}
sub vcl_backend_response {
set beresp.ttl = 4w;
}
sub vcl_recv {
if (req.url ~ "repodata") {
return(pass);
}
}
I didn’t need SSL, Varnish doesn’t speak SSL, I let my HAProxy server do the SSL termination.
Deep down I knew this wasn’t the right solution, okay, back to the drawing board.
I read a comment somewhere, on Reddit maybe, about a pacman user who exported their package directory as an NFS share, ah of course, so simple, so I set to it.
First, the share, my server fstab looks like this:
/var/cache/xbps /export/xbps non defaults,bind 0 0
And all of my clients’ fstabs look like this:
nfsserver:/export/xbps /var/cache/xbps nfs auto,noatime,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,intr,_netdev,timeo=300,retrans=1 0 0
Easy right, there’s some extra NFS incantations to export the bind mounted share.
This lives in /etc/exports and for simplicities sake, I allow connections on all interfaces:
/export/xbps *(rw,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)
This all works a treat, my package cache is shared between all of my machines, and my struggling 10mbit ADSL connection can have a reprieve.
Say what you want about NFS, this took 5 minutes all told and works better than my previous solution.
fin. © Zach Nedwich93f4b02RSSTOP