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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- All Arch Linux sites are under attack.
- No one knows why Arch is getting smacked around.
- You can get Arch Linux files and programs from GitHub.
Although not well-suited for new users, Arch Linux is a popular distro with a passionate fan base. So, why has someone been knocking down the Arch Linux site repeatedly for over a week now with an ongoing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack? We don’t know.
We’re not even sure who’s doing it or exactly how they’re conducting their DDoS. Besides the main website, the Arch User Repository (AUR) and the Arch community forums are also being hammered. Someone out there really doesn’t like Arch.
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Or perhaps, as has been suggested on some Reddit forums, some hacking group is trying out a DDoS attack on the lightly defended Arch sites. Your guess is as good as mine. Only the Arch Linux team knows for sure, and they’re not saying.
Officially, the Arch site volunteer staff is only saying:
“The Arch Linux Project is currently experiencing an ongoing denial of service attack that primarily impacts our main web page, the Arch User Repository (AUR), and the Forums.
“We are aware of the problems this creates for our end users and will continue to actively work with our hosting provider to mitigate the attack. We are also evaluating DDoS protection providers, carefully considering factors including cost, security, and ethical standards.”
That last consideration — ethical standards — may be why Arch doesn’t already have a mainstream DDoS prevention service in place, such as Cloudflare. Arch Linux is run by free software true-believers and volunteers; although Cloudflare uses open-source software, it’s not an open-source company.
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Cloudflare has long offered free DDoS protection for major open-source software projects. Some people on Reddit are wondering why Arch’s leadership doesn’t take Cloudflare up on this, but there’s no word yet on exactly what DDoS companies, if any, Arch’s leaders are talking to.
So, today, the DDoS attacks are continuing and causing partial or intermittent accessibility issues for anyone trying to reach the site or for users attempting to download installation ISOs, access documentation, fetch new software packages, or update exciting programs.
In the meantime, if you’re an Arch user and if archlinux.org is unavailable, you should use the mirrors already in your pacman-mirrorlist package instead of relying on the reflector tool.
For AUR disruptions, it’s a bit of a pain if you’re not a regular git user, but you cloned packages directly from the GitHub Arch Linux mirror. To do this, use the command:
$ git clone –branch –single-branch https://github.com/archlinux/aur.git
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You can also re-attempt a connection. Hey, it can work!
However, for now, you can expect to keep having trouble reaching any Arch Linux resources. Here’s hoping Arch Linux’s web presence will be back to normal soon.
