# Setup to use an Australian mirror site for packages ?



## Rob D. (Dec 21, 2014)

Hi All, I'm trying out FreeBSD again after getting tired of the need to constantly update my Gentoo systems, or fall into upgrade dependency hell. I'd like to be a good netizen and save Pacific bandwidth by using an Australian package mirror.

But how to do it is not obvious to me. I've looked at the list of FreeBSD mirror sites - that's easy to find. I *think* the answer might be to either change or add to the existing FreeBSD.conf file in /etc/pkg, but there's no clue as to the correct format of the package URL. I'm not even sure if the new pkgng stuff *allows* using a repository other than the default FreeBSD one ??

I *did* try setting PACKAGESITE and PACKAGEROOT, but as far as I can see these are ignored by the new pkg system (the -d option didn't give any clue as to where the packages were being fetched from, and using tcpdump showed me that pkg was using pkg0.isc.freebsd.org.http (149.20.53.28). And "Yes, Sir Dice, I did read Section 5.4 of the Handbook" as well as Googling, but couldn't find anything relevant ).

Thanks in advance for any help, and Regards,

Rob.


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## Rob D. (Dec 25, 2014)

Well, clearly, on the FreeBSD Forums ((Fora ?) God helps noobs who help themselves ! So, for any other noobs wondering how pkgng works I stumbled across this URL while reading some other forum posts - *http://pkg.freebsd.org/*

And it turns out that the new pkg *does* try to do its own geographic optimisation -


```
Beware, pkg(8) does not use http like your browser does. It does a DNS SRV record lookup and then processes the results according to weight and priority. It looks something like this:

% host -t srv _http._tcp.pkg.freebsd.org
_http._tcp.pkg.freebsd.org has SRV record 10 10 80 pkg0.nyi.freebsd.org.
_http._tcp.pkg.freebsd.org has SRV record 20 10 80 pkg0.isc.freebsd.org.
_http._tcp.pkg.freebsd.org has SRV record 50 10 80 pkg0.bme.freebsd.org.

With this, it uses fallbacks in case the closest mirror is unavailable.

We use MaxMind GeoLite based geo-dns to attempt to bias towards the closest mirror for you.
```

So it seems there's no need to manually configure a closest mirror. That said, it seems strange that there are quite a few Australian mirror sites holding the FreeBSD install files, packages, etc. But they don't seem to be set up for the new pkg system ??

As an aside - on the Gentoo fora I would have had a few replies from noobs, and definitely a succint reply from an expert, no matter how stupid or obvious the question. Not so here, apparently.

Merry Christmas to All,

Rob.


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