We’re pleased to announce that an updated Arch Linux (Arch Linux 2012.07) distribution template is available for immediate deployment from within the Linode Manager. The new template has the most recent system updates installed, which includes the changing of ‘/lib’ to a symlink. If you would like more information about deploying a distribution from within the Linode Manager, please reference this article in the Linode Library.
For new deployments of Arch Linux, you will need to initialize the pacman keyring before attempting to use it for the first time. We also recommend that all users who deploy Arch Linux keep an eye on the Arch Linux News archive. Information regarding new updates, that may require some level of manual intervention to complete, will be provided in the archive.
We hope you enjoy the updated Arch Linux template!
-Tim
Comments (14)
Very cool! It can be a pain to deploy/update a new Arch install if it has been a long time since the package snapshot.
Awesome, thank you! You guys must have read my mind (or you’ve been looking at the logs), as I was just encountering issues with installing from the old image last night. Especially with the recent changes to glibc, updating a new Arch node seemed to be quite broken.
Keeping the template fairly up-to-date is important in a rolling release distro, especially when we are not able to do a typical netinstall.
I was just about to post a bug/feature request, and then noticed this post.
Thanks guys!
Awesome stuff Linode! Do keep up the great stuff!
For new deployments of Arch Linux, you will need to initialize the pacman keyring before attempting to use it for the first time.
Great, Linode, superb as always!
Now, for all you archers out there. A shell script that will generate entropy, initialize and populate the keyring.
http://linux.vrnw.org/arch/scripts/pacman_key_init.sh
The idea for this script was inspired by a forum post.
http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?t=9143&p=52602#p52574
Enjoy!
Hey,
You may want to make the following adjustment to your script:
“mandb > /dev/null 2>1” becomes “mandb 2>&1 > /dev/null”
The 2>&1 redirection needs to come first so that both go to /dev/null, and it needs the ampersand to redirect properly.
Hi,
Done, although, I never saw where the ampersand was supposed to go. It should work better now, though.
Hi Blake,
Wouldn’t running mandb in a loop produce terrible entropy? From what I’ve understood, the idea is to gather something so long and random that it’s not easily guessable (like input from someone banging on the keyboard like a monkey and disk timings from regular use).
I am not a cryptoanalist, but in theory at least, if every Arch user ran the same mandb command on the same set of manpages, they would get the same or somehow similar keys, right? That can’t be good.
Wander
Wander:
Running mandb or similar commands like that isn’t pumping output from mandb or whatever command you run into your /dev/random; the idea is to cause lots of system activity from which entropy is drawn. The nature of the activity is largely irrelevant, as the entropy is drawn from the system *doing things*, not piped in directly from what it’s doing.
“The 2>&1 redirection needs to come first so that both go to /dev/null, and it needs the ampersand to redirect properly.”
This is incorrect. The following redirects both stdout and stderr to /dev/null:
mandb > /dev/null 2>&1
Any Bourne shell variant (bash, dash, etc.) will read this line as “redirect stdout to /dev/null, and redirect stderr to wherever stdout is being sent”.
Hi,
I updated the script as of three, four weeks ago when I realized your statement was correct, though hadn’t been posted at the time. The script, as it is now, will redirect correctly.
Does the current image handle the switch to systemd?
Stephen Tanner:
The current image uses systemd by default, so no switch is necessary.
Blake