When I attended the openSUSE Asia Summit in 2019, I my friends in Indonesia about their experience in setting up the mirror for Indonesian users.
Earlier this year, when Luboš Kocman visited Mauritius, we spoke about it again.
Then, a few weeks ago, I heard from cloud.mu, who were willing to sponsor a server for mirror purposes. That was just perfect timing. I had started discussions with an ISP but then cloud.mu was not just willing to provide the server & bandwidth resources but their speed to deploy and assist was even more commendable.
Once the server was ready, the next step was to contact openSUSE admins to update the DNS records for opensuse.mu. I sent my request to the openSUSE Board for the purchase the domain a long time ago. Until now I used to run a small blog for openSUSE tips & tutorials on opensuse.mu. The domain is owned by SUSE and mananged by the openSUSE admins, i.e the Heroes team.
After a few trials to sync from rsync.opensuse.org and other mirrors closer to Mauritius, I contacted the Heroes to get access to stage.opensuse.org, the restricted rsync server of openSUSE. After that, it was a matter of a few days to sync all that content.
Finally, the openSUSE mirror for Mauritius was ready.
Compared to other regions, where there are several mirrors in the same country, the whole African continent had only two openSUSE mirrors until now. One managed by TENET (Tertiary Education and Research Network) in South Africa and the other one by Liquid Telecom in Kenya. Mauritius joins that list as the third mirror in the African region, thanks to cloud.mu.
How to switch to the openSUSE Mauritius mirror?
Switching to the Mauritian mirror is easy. First, remove the current repos that you have by either running zypper lr to identify them and zypper rr repo-name to remove the repos, or go to /etc/zypp/repos.d and remove the .repo files of the openSUSE repositories. If you have repos for other applications, e.g Google Chrome, VS Code etc, leave them.
Then, if you're using Leap, you can the Leap 15.3 OSS, Non-OSS and Update repositories.
sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/distribution/leap/15.3/repo/oss openSUSE-Leap-OSS
sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/distribution/leap/15.3/repo/non-oss openSUSE-Leap-Non-OSS
sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/update/leap/15.3/oss openSUSE-Leap-Update-OSS
sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/update/leap/15.3/non-oss openSUSE-Leap-Update-Non-OSSIf you're using Tumbleweed, then add the following repositories.
sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/tumbleweed/repo/oss openSUSE-Tumbleweed-OSS
sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/tumbleweed/repo/non-oss openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Non-OSS
sudo zypper ar https://mirror.opensuse.mu/update/tumbleweed openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Update-OSSThe mirror contains files for the x86_64 architecture only. If there is a need for other architectures, I'll do the necessary. Ping me on social media or send a mail to [email protected].