After a small forced hiatus, userrepository.eu is back. The Covid-19 pandemic made a hit in my income and the wife’s income, so I had to temporarily suspend non-priority expenses. During this period, I had time to consider a few things about the future of the project and decided to change the provider from Scaleway to Hetzner, mostly because the Arch image they’re using is essentially abandonware.
If you’re reading this, you’ll probably know that Arch Linux changed the default package compression to ZSTD. In order to update or install any package, you’ll need a pacman version that supports this compression and up-to-date libraries. These requirements aren’t met in older Arch images, like the one used by Scaleway, so the only two solutions were installing another distribution, chrooting into it and hack an Arch install (the solution presented to me by Scaleway support) or change provider. The second option was the less time-consuming one.
Hetzner doesn’t provide Arch by default when creating a virtual manchine, but after creating it the user can boot it in rescue mode and run the installimage script that makes the process almost a breeze. After running the script, I advise you to manually chroot and temporarily allow root logins for the SSH daemon in order to be able to login remotely after booting the VM normally.
The virtual machine configuration I chose has similar specs to the previous one with Scaleway: 4vCPUs and 8GB of RAM. In the first few hours of use, I noticed a small improvement in package compile times - but this is just my perception; I have yet to time the build times. But even things like refreshing the repository package list is faster, way faster, and that’s really noticeable.
For the time being, I’ll consider userrepository.eu in beta state, so use it with some degree of carefulness. The source is the same, but I changed the provider and I’m evaluation the virtual machine and network performance. Let’s see how it goes.