Arch Linux

kamocat

Member

Registered: 2014-08-21

Posts: 24

Pacman -Sy freezes while syncing extra [SOLVED]

Pacman takes a long time to sync the extra database. I only takes a few seconds while actually downloading, but the real time between attempting and starting the download is several minutes.
I have to use the --disable-download-timeout flag to prevent it from giving up.

There are a few things about this that are particularly strange:

• Only the Extra and extra-testing databases are affected. Not core or multilib or multilib-testing.

• I only see this issue when running arch in a VM (Virtualbox) on my work computer (Windows 10). Native installation on my personal computer is unaffected, nor is a Virtualbox VM on my personal computer.

To avoid any questions of configuration, I tested using only my closest mirror (cat.pdx.edu), on the live-boot of the installation iso image. It took over ten minutes, although the actual download time was only a couple seconds.

Last edited by kamocat (2024-05-03 00:23:18)

kamocat

Member

Registered: 2014-08-21

Posts: 24

Re: Pacman -Sy freezes while syncing extra [SOLVED]

Poking around a little more, this could have to do with the corporate MITM providing self-signed SSL certificates, invalidating all https requests. Or doing some analysis on the way in. After all, the core database is only 128kiB where the extra database is 8 MiB.
I'll try to add the root certificate to the trusted certs after I complete the install.

EDIT:
I added the root certificate using instructions from the wiki. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Transp … rust_store
However, this did not resolve the issue. I tried reflector, filtering by http vs https. Both resulted in timeouts.

Last edited by kamocat (2024-04-23 05:36:04)

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 51,796

Re: Pacman -Sy freezes while syncing extra [SOLVED]

wget http://archlinux.thaller.ws/extra/os/x86_64/extra.db

I only see this issue when running arch in a VM (Virtualbox) on my work computer (Windows 10).

And monitor the traffic on the host - chances are it's not the corporate FW but the host system? (Windows defender or whatever)

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kamocat

Member

Registered: 2014-08-21

Posts: 24

Re: Pacman -Sy freezes while syncing extra [SOLVED]

After the DNS lookup, I don't see any packets to ip.addr == 162.55.244.107
I installed wireshark in Arch too to make sure I wasn't crazy, and I can see them from there just fine, but not from the host. I don't even have any unsecured http packets on the host. On the other hand, I have thousands of TLS packets and no good way to find the relevant ones.

At that point, I figured you were right.
So I added C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VirtualBoxVM.exe to my firewall exceptions, and it's working great.

kamocat

Member

Registered: 2014-08-21

Posts: 24

Re: Pacman -Sy freezes while syncing extra [SOLVED]

The story continues:
My company configures all non-work networks as "public", and does not allow me to bypass the firewall on public networks. This means that the firewall is still a nuisance at home, even when connected to the VPN.
At the moment, my way around this is changing the VM network adapter from NAT to Host, so it gets its own IP address.
This probably will not work at the office,