We want to provide an update on the recent service outages affecting our infrastructure. The Arch Linux Project is currently experiencing an ongoing denial of service attack that primarily impacts our main webpage, the Arch User Repository (AUR), and the Forums.

We are aware of the problems that 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 while carefully considering factors including cost, security, and ethical standards.

To improve the communication around this issue we will provide regular updates on our service status page going forward.

As a volunteer-driven project, we appreciate the community's patience as our DevOps team works to resolve these issues. Please bear with us and thank you for all the support you have shown so far.

Workarounds during service disruption

• In the case of downtime for archlinux.org:
  • Mirrors: The mirror list endpoint used in tools like reflector is hosted on this site. Please default to the mirrors listed in the pacman-mirrorlist package during an outage.
  • ISO: Our installation image is available on a lot of the mirrors, for example the DevOps administered geomirrors. Please always verify its integrity as described on the wiki and confirm it is signed by 0x3E80CA1A8B89F69CBA57D98A76A5EF9054449A5C (or other trusted keys that may be used in the future).
• In the case of downtime for aur.archlinux.org:
  • Packages: We maintain a mirror of AUR packages on GitHub. You can retrieve a package using: $ git clone --branch <package_name> --single-branch https://github.com/archlinux/aur.git <package_name>
• In the case of downtime for wiki.archlinux.org:
  • Docs: The arch-wiki-docs and arch-wiki-lite contain recent snapshots of the articles as hosted on the Arch Linux wiki.

Additional remarks

• Our services may send an initial connection reset due to the TCP SYN authentication performed by our hosting provider, but subsequent requests should work as expected.

• We are keeping technical details about the attack, its origin and our mitigation tactics internal while the attack is still ongoing.

Starting with 7.4.1-2, the following Zabbix system user accounts (previously shipped by their related packages) will no longer be used. Instead, all Zabbix components will now rely on a shared zabbix user account (as originally intended by upstream and done by other distributions):

• zabbix-server
• zabbix-proxy
• zabbix-agent (also used by the zabbix-agent2 package)
• zabbix-web-service

This shared zabbix user account is provided by the newly introduced zabbix-common split package, which is now a dependency for all relevant zabbix-* packages.

The switch to the new user account is handled automatically for the corresponding main configuration files and systemd service units.

However, manual intervention may be required if you created custom files or configurations referencing to and / or being owned by the above deprecated users accounts, for example:

• PSK files used for encrypted communication
• Custom scripts for metrics collections or report generations
• sudoers rules for metrics requiring elevated privileges to be collected
• ...

Those should therefore be updated to refer to and / or be owned by the new zabbix user account, otherwise some services or user parameters may fail to work properly, or not at all.

Once migrated, you may remove the obsolete user accounts from your system.