Pacserve
Pacserve allows to easily share pacman packages between computers. This is very useful, if you have a slow internet connection, but multiple machines running Arch Linux.
Contents
Installation
You can either install pacserve manually from the AUR, or with the following method.
From Xyne's repository
Xyne is the author of pacserve, you can directly use his repository by adding the following to your pacman.conf.
/etc/pacman.conf
... [xyne-x86_64] # A repo for Xyne's own projects: http://xyne.archlinux.ca/projects/ SigLevel = Required Server = http://xyne.archlinux.ca/repos/xyne
Make sure that you have replaced x86_64 with i686 or any depending on your architecture. Then install the package:
# pacman -Sy pacserve
Finally enable and start the daemon:
# systemctl enable pacserve.service # systemctl start pacserve.service
In case you use iptables, you will probably want to start the pacserve-ports service, too.
Standalone usage
Instead of pacman, use the pacsrv wrapper to perform an update, install packages and so on. It will automatically download all packages from the LAN, if someone hosts them with pacserve there. Otherwise it will just download them from the internet mirrors, as usually. For example:
pacsrv -Syu pacsrv -S openssh
Configure Pacman to use Pacserve
If you are always running the pacserve daemon and want pacman to use it without the wrapper, add the following line below each repository in /etc/pacman.conf:
Include = /etc/pacman.d/pacserve
Here's an example for the Xyne repository:
/etc/pacman.conf
... [xyne-x86_64] SigLevel = Required Include = /etc/pacman.d/pacserve Server = http://xyne.archlinux.ca/repos/xyne ...
Alternatively (for official mirrors only), you may insert the Include...-line at the top of the Pacman mirrorlist file or let pacman.conf-insert_pacserve generate a pacman.conf file for you.
Troubleshooting
Problems if using external downloaders in pacman.conf
If you're using an external downloader such as wget, pacsrv may return errors when downloading. To work around these errors, simply quote the url and output formatting strings (%u
resp. %o
) using single quotes:
XferCommand = /usr/bin/wget --timeout=6 --passive-ftp -c -O '%o' '%u'