Unusual method installing addons

Add-Ons
1

Reference to the post

This may sound ridiculous, but I’ve just decided to tell you about an unusual method I experimented with last year to install IpFire addons.
I hadn’t registered yet at “community.ipfire.org” and I remember that around that time IpFire support for x86 (Intel/Amd) ended.
Already on that date I had the instinct to collect a copy of your latest IpFire x86 distribution, addons included.
For ISOs no problem. I downloaded them from your sites and I still treasure them.
By editing the files of the IpFire machine with WinSCP, I was able to understand the PakFire download system and I understood that everything was downloaded from the mirror
Index of /pakfire2
Then a light bulb went on and I thought of “cloning” that mirror of yours in my local machine, installing the Apache web server and doing a clean installation of IpFire in a VmWare machine.
I downloaded from the browser all the “.db”, “meta-…”, “.ipfire”, … files from your mirror, a very long job.
Once I recreated the mirror on my machine “192.168.1.8” with Apache installed, I edited “/opt/pakfire/etc/pakfire.conf”
and I replaced the line
$mirror = “Index of /pakfire2”;
with
$mirror = “https://192.168.1.8/pakfire2”;
I isolated my network from the internet and it was a success: PakFire was able to install and uninstall all packages equally.

I did other studies by analyzing the IpFire files and I was able to understand in which folders PakFire downloaded the mirror files before installing them.
So I did another test:

  1. I took down the IpFire virtual machine and recreated a clean one under emulation (making sure to keep it isolated from the internet).

  2. in the “/opt/pakfire/db/list” folder I uploaded all the mirror “.db” files downloaded from the browser

  3. in the “/opt/pakfire/db/meta” folder I uploaded all the “meta…” files of the mirror downloaded from the browser

  4. in the “/var/cache/pakfire” folder I uploaded all the mirror “.pakfire” files downloaded from the browser

I remember that it was a success, PakFire was able to install and uninstall all the addons in an unlimited way, even if obviously it was unable to update them due to no internet connection.

From these tests I thought that installing the offline addons was natural and could be done with a simple shell command, downloading only the .pakfire package from the mirror.
But perhaps I have done a useless procedure, since old versions of security software do not bring any good.

2

Hi @casabenedetti ,

you are right in both topics.

  • You can install a local mirror to do the updates. But you are limited to your local copy. Any corrections or updates don’t go ‘automatically’ to your system.
  • The process is useless, indeed. Security fixes ( usually necessary! ) don’t find their way into your system. In case of unmaintained architectures you cannot fix this by doing update downloads, the modules just don’t exist.

The only way to support old systems would be to compile them your own. But in case of the OS ( Linux ) this may be not easy. The support of these HW ends more and more, and thus the support for standard programs and addons.

2 Likes
3

Of course. It’s right. No updates, no security. I am aware that the local mirror cannot update.
Not being a developer I’m not able to do anything else.
Mine was more of a gaming experiment.
Thanks again for the support and I never get tired of saying:
Forgive my english. :smiling_face: