Pacman mirror, system update, and dhcpcd issues... oh my.

minasmorath · 2010-01-31 06:59:10

Hello fellow Archers,

I have been having a few issues that the Wiki and Google somehow cannot effectively solve. I have been using Arch for about a year and Linux for about 4 years, I am not a newbie by any means, but I am stumped since none of the normal fixes work for my problems.

First off I am suddenly having massive issues with the pacman mirrorlist. Pacman has worked fine for months, and out of the blue (updated a couple days before, no reboots, nothing in between) I wake up, shake my mouse to unblank my screen, decide to install blender, and the package doesn't exist on the server??? I tried a -Syyu immediately after that and that returned droves of packages to update, but the same thing happened, they all came back as "error: failed retrieving file '<package>.tar.gz' from <mirror> : File unavailable (e.g., file not found, no access)", over and over, for every mirror in the list (I did have a working, unblocked network connection) and when pacman finally downloaded whatever package from any random mirror ( I have all of them uncommented and arranged by order of most up to date thanks to reflector), they were all 6.4kb and pacman warned me that they were corrupt. This is very confusing to me not only because a whole drove of mirrors seemingly broke overnight, but because it spawned a whole other host of problems afterwards.

My next problem started when I thought maybe I had installed a new kernel and didn't reboot, causing version mismatches and other nasty little breaks, so I rebooted (mind you I ctrl-c the pacman process during the hellishly broken update cycle before it does any damage) and lost all network connectivity when gnome came back up. Come to find that dhcpcd wrecks when two dhcp servers try to give the same IP and start NAKing each other out, even after I commented the 'request dhcp_server_identifier' line out of /etc/dhcpcd.conf, as was suggested in many a thread on many a forum. I cannot reproduce the exact error right now, as that would kill my connection that I am using to post here, the connection which I finally forced one of the servers to give me with dhcpcd -r <ip address> where <ip address> was the ip both servers were trying to give me while NAKing each other out, I don't know why it works but it does. Stupid hacks.

Essentially I am looking for any input, whether good, bad, long, short, smart, stupid, or otherwise, because this laptop is my life blood as a CS student, and I need it to work the way it should, and God knows I'm not reinstalling M$ Winblows.

Thanks ahead of time for reading my wall of text and for any input you can give,

Mitch

Snowman · 2010-01-31 11:23:45

for the mirror problem, you need to wait : http://www.archlinux.org/news/482/

minasmorath · 2010-01-31 17:23:59

Well, I guess I should have seen that... I really should start digged through the news page first, thanks.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-01-31 06:59:10

Pacman mirror, system update, and dhcpcd issues... oh my.

#2 2010-01-31 11:23:45

Re: Pacman mirror, system update, and dhcpcd issues... oh my.

#3 2010-01-31 17:23:59

Re: Pacman mirror, system update, and dhcpcd issues... oh my.

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