For some time now, the slakfinder.org website has been offline. The domain still exists, but the web site just does not respond. Matteo Rossini (zerouno) needed a break from computers, so it is likely that the site won’t return on short notice.
The effect of the site’s unavailability becomes quite obvious if you use the slackpkg+ extension for slackpkg to manage the packages you installed from 3rd-party community repositories. The “/etc/slackpkg/slackpkgplus.conf” configuration file contains these lines:
?# use this to keep the slackpkg+ package updated to the latest stable release
MIRRORPLUS['slackpkgplus']=https://slakfinder.org/slackpkg+15/
… and that causes a problem every time you run “slackpkg update“. There will be a timeout querying slakfinder.org and a subsequent error. After that, slackpkg will function as usual, you just won’t be able to check on updates for slackpkg+. But the error is annoying.
Luckily I am mirroring the repository for a long while now, so this is easy to fix. Replace the MIRRORPLUS URL above with the following line and run a “slackpkg update“, which will solve the timeout issue:
MIRRORPLUS['slackpkgplus']=https://slackware.nl/slackpkgplus15/
Now, slakfinder.org fulfilled another role!
It hosted a web-based Slackware package search tool. That may actually have been used a lot more than the slackpkg+ repository.
Unfortunately there has never been another instance of that package searcher available online, and the only thing I could dig up is a 10-year old Git repository archive for its code at https://github.com/mrossini/slakfinder . The code does not work with PHP 7, it has no documentation and the sparse comments in the code are mostly in Italian. It’s greek to me 😉
I thought, “a nice weekend project” and I spent the last few days understanding and then fixing the code. I looked at the repositories that it searched (the Internet Archive luckily created a snapshot early December 2022, right before the site disappeared) and decided to prune that repository collection to just the ones that support Slackware 14.2 and newer, and are known to me. That still leaves 62 repositories.
Today I am opening a custom instance of slakfinder on slackware.nl which will hopefully prevent new downtime. Get a look at it here: https://slackware.nl/slakfinder/ .
I haven’t tested the Guest Book, feel free to leave your comments there as well as in the comments section below. Commenting here on the blog will give you a much higher probability of me answering.
If there’s repositories (Slackware-compatible and for Slackware 14.2 or newer) that you want me to add, let me know.
Enjoy! Eric
Alien Bob to the rescue! 🙂
Wow, thanks, Eric!!!!
Well done Eric!
If you need any help with decoding comments in italian let me know
I used Google Translate 🙂 I had to understand those comments first, so that I could make sense of the code.
Thanks Eric.
Posted a link on LQ
— kjh
Thanks again Eric, that timeout was annoying and worrisome for those of us who didn’t understand why it was happening.
If it’s possible… Wait… You already made it !
Amazing !
Thanks Eric!
How do we implement this into the slackpkgplus.sh file so that online search inquiry will work again?
You can’t. The new online search functionality behind http://slakfinder.org/slfcli.php was never made public by zerouno, and now it is inaccessible. If you find a copy of his code let me know.
Is there any replacement for these lines (which I was using)?
# use the development branch to use the mainline version and help develop by reporting bugs.
#MIRRORPLUS[‘slackpkgplus’]=https://slakfinder.org/slackpkg+dev/
I never mirrored the repository containing the package for the development branch, and since slakfinder.org is now permanently down, I am unable to provide a mirror.
It does not make any difference for you whatsoever – there will not be an update to this ‘dev’ version so you could also remove that URL from the slackpkgplus.conf and then blacklist ‘slackpkg+’.
I was able to obtain a copy of the repository, you can now use this alternative URL:
https://slackware.nl/slackpkgplusdev/
or else:
https://us.slackware.nl/slackpkgplusdev/
Great work again. Thanks.
Would you consider adding http://www.slackel.gr/repo/ to the mix?
And https://slackware.uk/slackonly/ ? Although that one is an old mirror and current there is already 15.0.
I will add slackel to the search engine’s repositories but slackonly contains outdated packages and seems un-maintained. Not going to absorb that one.
Ah, slackonly is still up:
https://slackonly.com/pub/packages/
Sorry for spamming! 🙂
https://download.salixos.org/
could that one be added?
It’s the only one I know of that has a recent Vice build (GTK3 version), it’s one of the few packages I never succeeded in building myself. And I have to play my old Commodore 64 games!
If you already know about the package, you don’t have to search for it. And if you want to manage the package installation, then it is up to you to add the salixos repository to your slackpkgplus.conf file.
But yes, I am going to add it to the search engine.
Awesome
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Thanks for your work.
I often used the search tool,
so i miss https://slack.conraid.net/repository/slackware64-current/.
Would it be possible to add this repository ?
Hi Jenner, no problem, I will add it. Conraid’s repository supports file-search as well, good.
Hi Eric.
As always, thanks for maintaining Matteo Rossini (zerouno)’s work.
Those timeouts were not very descriptive and annoying.
I changed mirror server of course with no success.
Back to normality now… Thanks again Eric.
Thanks once again, Eric. I’ve relied on your mirror for slackpkg+ for some time, but occasionally used the search on slakfinder, too. I thank Matteo and wish him the best.
At the moment the search seems to be broken, no results what so ever, at least on my side. Cheers, Marco
Yeah the update process hung and it had grabbed the mariadb server by the throat. It had also generated a logfile of 197 GB in size during that time 🙁
I removed the logfile and that released the database somehow. It works now.
Hi Eric! Could you provide the source? I would like to make a mirror in Brazil! Unfortunately .nl is too slow for us!
Thanks for the support!
I can’t believe that a text-based site like slakfinder is too slow anywhere. If it seems slow it is because file-based search creates a big SQL query where it just takes a while to return results.
There’s nothing to download, so nothing to mirror.