Re: [Debconf-video] Mirrorbrain for debian video archive
On 11/06/15 12:46, Holger Levsen wrote:
> On Sonntag, 25. Oktober 2015, Michael Meier wrote:
>> I'm currently running the experimental debian-cd download redirector
>> based on mirrorbrain at http://debian-cd.debian.net/, and pabs has asked
>> me to look into using mirrorbrain for the Debian meetings video archive
>> too. I did, and this is what I found so far.
> While I personally don't see much use for this I've come to understand such a
> service would be useful for people not close to cdimage.debian.org (as I am
> and I believe most people in the videoteam), so I think in general we should
> use/provide such a service.
> I'm just *very* uneasy about having it run on systems not maintained by Debian
> (eg your system, my system, whatever), as then we wont have guarantee that
> this service will be there in a year or five or ten.
I'm not sure I'm following you here. AFAICT, pretty much the whole
debian video infrastructure is running on systems not maintained by
Debian - even the "official archive" under meetings-archive.debian.net
is just ftp.acc.umu.se? And I would assume those are machines not owned
by the debian project, although there probably is a certain overlap
between the admins of that machine and the DSA team.
And you're correct, there is no guarantee that I or someone else will
still run this service in a year or five or ten. But in that case you
could trivially switch back to what you have now. Which (IMHO) sadly
isn't all that great.
> Is mirrorbrain packaged and available in Debian? I believe it's not (but I am
> writing this offline), so let me rephrase the question: where is the source
> for the mirrorbrain code and could you share the config?
It is not, which is basically the whole problem with it. Apparently that
has been discussed for ages, mainly for the cdimages, but so far noone
has been willing to adopt the package. One of the hopes behind me
running debian-cd.debian.net was, that it would be easier to motivate
some debian developer to adopt the mirrorbain package, after it has
proven to be useful.
You can find discussions about this on the debian-mirrors mailing list, e.g.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-mirrors/2015/05/msg00000.html
and following... Many things were also discussed on IRC.
Mirrorbrain is GPL, I'm sure you can google the URL to the sources
faster than I can. You can even get prebuilt packages for Debian from
the OpenSuSE build service. It's just not in the standard/official
Debian repositories.
I would provide a dump of the database (which contains which mirrors it
knows about, their priorities/settings) and the config (mostly trivial,
probably easier to recreate on a new machine) when it makes sense, e.g.
to move this from my machine to a proper DSA maintained box. However, in
the current state of things, that would only make sense for the
debian-cd-image instance, because the one for the video archive contains
(as discussed) so few mirrors that it's quite literally just 5 minutes
of work to configure them into a new, blank mirrorbrain installation.
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