I foresee our need to setup a Manjaro mirror. This mirror would be sync’ed and once testing of the current state is agreeable against our needs, the sync’ing would be halted until all of our RPi4 are updated against this tested state. And then subsequently, the process is restarted and we rinse and repeat.
We also could use a custom private repo to hold a couple of packages from the AUR and/or our own package builds.
Can one repo mirror perform both functions? To be both sync’ed against the official mirrors yet also hold a few packages that are not in the official mirrors? Or will the mirror sync’ing process remove the unofficial packages? Maybe if I name these special packages a different name it will work?
I do not know where you are going with this but setting up a mirror cloning an existing repo seems like overkill. From what you said you had one maybe 2 packages from AUR you were looking at.
There are some guides to setting up a simple personal repo out there using something like gitlab to serve them. I have never set one up but to me something like what this guy did has some automation in it. He said he does not do it any more and gave his reasons like repo / file size limitations but you just want a couple of packages if that is still true.
I have a couple of needs, a single solution would be nice of course:
The first and far simpler issue is the few AUR packages needed.
The second and more significant issue is pure numbers… 200 RPi4 to keep maintained and in sync, while in production, and with a priority on security patches. PXE booting may end up being the answer. But if not, having a repo that does not update until I am ready to move forward with the 200 will be required. The time required could extend beyond a single update cycle, so running updates against the official repos would probably prove to be challenging.
Mass producing SD cards is also an option but not preferred.
So at this point I am exploring my options. If you have other ideas, I am open to them.
It’s easy enough to set up a repo for your AUR packages.
But it’s out of the scope of this support forum to help you setup a mirror, that only updates when you update it. Would need some fancy rsync scripts, since we are part of the regular Manjaro x64 repo.
Hmm, I figured simply stopping the rsync process would work… but then I do not know the details of how the repos operate. I assumed rsync or similar. More or less, that is what I hoping to find out… is it possible, will it break, I am crazy to consider it, or even sure, it is done all of the time… that kind of feedback. But I will refrain from asking more concerning this subject, if you deem it out of scope.
Sure, you can set up a repo/mirror, that only does manual syncs.
The problem you are likely to face, is how do you keep all your 200 rpi’s only on that 1 mirror. You have to create/maintain a custom mirrorlist for pacman-mirrors that wont get overwritten on updates.
Else they will all just use official mirrors again when the mirrorlist update gets triggered.
I was expecting to use “chattr +i” on the mirror list, it has helped me more than once in similar situations. But that could cause issues, so to be determined.
Edit: Maybe a cleaner way would be to place the US mirrors in the /etc/hosts file but point them to the custom repo.
Would need some fancy rsync scripts, since we are part of the regular Manjaro x64 repo.