8 years ago, I saw a post somewhere about a pretty small niché distro that was looking for a mirror for its packages. That got me thinking about the possibility to provide a public mirror for Linux packages for various distros.

It started back then in my home office, with redundant ISP and the two HP Microservers and the Supermicro box that I had running. My ambitions did not stop, and I applied to be an official mirror for Debian, Ubuntu, Parabola, Linux-Libre and more in the weeks after.

One year after that, I got access to a nice environment that my friends had. With 100TB of storage and unlimited bandwidth – I moved the mirror there, and it has been living there ever since.

Fast forward a couple of years...

The small distros that mirror.linux.pizza was the sole mirror for has dissappeared, and the other projects such as Parabola, EndeavourOS and PureOS where I was the first one to start mirroring them – has gotten plenty of more mirrors to help out.

I've decided to shut mirror.linux.pizza down, the reason is financial and I want to focus my effort on the community that is social.linux.pizza instead.

I've already notified the different projects about the shut down, and I will take steps to ensure that systems does not break after the mirror goes offline, such as HTTP-redirects to other mirrors in the nordic.

I've also reached out to the hosting providers that have been using the mirror exclusively to notify them about the upcoming change, so they can prepare for that aswell.

I am thankful that I have been able to give something back to the community by hosting this mirror – around 100k unique IP-addresses connect to it every day. So it did definitely help out!

#linux #mirror #mirrorlinuxpizza #sunset #debian #ubuntu #pureos

Have you ever installed packages from third party repositories to later realize that it was not the best idea? No? Well – I have.

But from now on, I wont do it. And instead utilize chroot!

In this section, we'll cover how you do it on your Debian-based system aswell as on Fedora.

Install the package debootstrap

apt update; apt install debootstrap

Or if you are on Fedora:

dnf install debootstrap

Now, create a catalogue anywhere of your choosing, for example in /srv

mkdir /srv/chroot

Great. Now depending on what you want. Perform any of the following:

debootstrap bullseye /srv/chroot http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian

debootstrap  jammy /srv/chroot http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu

You should see it pull down all the packages needed for the distro to start, and when it is complete – you can enter the chroot:

chroot /srv/chroot

That's it! Now you can install, test or compile your packages as usual.

And when you are done, you can simply remove the catalogue and start fresh – if you want.

Here is a quick demo of the actual process:

#linux #chroot #sysadmin #debian #ubuntu #fedora