If you’re in­stalling or up­dat­ing Arch Linux, or any Linux dis­tro for that mat­ter, you’ll no­tice that your up­date files come from mir­rors near­est to you to en­sure faster down­loads. These mir­ror servers are of­ten ran by vol­un­teers, aca­d­e­mic in­sti­tu­tions (shout-out to mir­rors.rit.edu), and com­pa­nies that con­tribute band­width and stor­age to sup­port the open-source com­mu­nity, and they of­ten serve more than just a sin­gle dis­tro; files hosted usu­ally in­clude other repos­i­to­ries and files of var­i­ous dis­tros.

Now if you’re in the UAE and us­ing Arch Linux like me, you’ll no­tice that some of these might come through from a mir­ror within the UAE it­self:

mir­ror.hafeezh.com/​arch­linux

As a mat­ter of fact, this is the only Arch Linux mir­ror in the UAE. Or any Linux mir­ror, for that mat­ter. This piqued my in­ter­est even more; who was be­hind this?

Spoiler alert: I still don’t know.

I went dig­ging a bit, quite lit­er­ally, with the do­main. No DNS records (other than Amazon name­servers) and WHOIS had no in­for­ma­tion ei­ther, they were pro­tected with do­main pri­vacy ser­vices like every­one does these days.

When you want your mir­ror listed on the Arch Linux wiki, you need to open a PR on their GitLab repos­i­tory for the docs. Sure enough, there was a pro­file and a full name.

But this per­son clearly knows how to clean up their dig­i­tal foot­print be­cause I did not get any fur­ther from the GitLab ac­count. I did, how­ever, find a few StackOverflow threads from five years ago about Python from the same user­name, noth­ing use­ful there. It seems like they were re­ally stuck on mak­ing a GUI ap­pli­ca­tion with Tkinter.

Lastly, look­ing up the IP ad­dress be­hind mir­ror.hafeezh.com gave in­ter­est­ing re­sults: the mir­ror seems to be run­ning out of a res­i­den­tial ad­dress in Abu Dhabi, like straight outta their home. I know this be­cause some res­i­den­tial IPs in the UAE still have a host­name that con­tains “Al Shamil”, which was the legacy brand name for Etisalat’s (now e&) res­i­den­tial broad­band ser­vice. I imag­ine they must be foot­ing a re­ally large e& bill for that out­go­ing band­width.

Whoever you are, I hope your pil­lows are al­ways cold on both sides. I’m still in­ter­ested as to the rea­son why you’re run­ning solely an Arch Linux mir­ror straight outta your base­ment, but I fully re­spect the hus­tle.

Maybe I should send an email to that ad­dress on GitLab and get some an­swers?

P. S. For those con­cerned about pri­vacy or the lack thereof of per­sonal in­for­ma­tion men­tioned above, please note that even though the IP ad­dress be­hind the mir­ror is res­i­den­tial, they only re­solve to an ap­prox­i­mate re­gion and are of­ten dy­namic. All other in­for­ma­tion pre­sented here are avail­able pub­licly on­line and can be found via rea­son­able and eas­ily ac­ces­si­ble means.