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[update] Automatic mirror selection - feedback appreciated



Hi,

Thanks to the help of Adam Borowski we now got a working solution for an
automatic mirror selection scheme.

Please help us test this infrastructure so that I can convince the DSA
to add it to our servers or at least give us a delegation from a
debian.{net,org} subzone! ;)

Again: I have no intention of supplanting any current structure, only
adding some more functionality to what we already have.


How to make it work:
--------------------

Simply change whatever mirror you're currently using on
/etc/apt/sources.list to:

<arch>-geomirror.debian.net

Where <arch> is the output of "dpkg --print-architecture".

Please make sure the DNS propagation has hit you, since the debian.net
aliases were all created earlier today.


How it works:
-------------

The <arch>-geomirror.d.n addresses are manually added CNAMEs to a
PowerDNS server that manages the zone geomirror.angband.pl (helpfully
loaned by Adam Borowski). This server is running pdns-backend-pipe,
which simply runs a script to determine the best mirror based on the
contents of Mirrors.masterlist[0], the IP that originated the request
and the requested architecture.

The current logic for selecting mirrors is very crude and only makes
sure the selected mirror is on the user's country and has the selected
arch, prioritizing mirrors that are called 'ftp.*.debian.org' and leafs
over push mirrors.
One possible improvement would be fetching information from DMC[1] to
help the prioritizing of hosts based on freshness (this could also help
avoid temporarily downed mirrors).

The source code for the backend script is available at[2].

The name 'geomirror' was picked for lack of a better suggestion. Please
feel free to give one! ;)


Known problems:
--------------

Since it's based on CNAMEs, a mirror that works on a separate virtual
host than the server's default won't be usable by this scheme.

In a quick test scan (ignoring all non-related errors), about 84 of the
358 archive mirrors are affected by this issue, 9 of which are top-level
country mirrors (BR, CL, HK, IS, IT, PT, TR, UK and 2 of the 4
round-robins for CA).
Simply adding:
"ServerAlias *.geomirror.debian.org"
(or whatever the official address ends up being) to apache-based mirrors
should suffice, so I hope getting a delegation from DSA would be enough
to ask the mirror admins to add this alias to their mirrors. Please
correct me if I'm wrong and there's some other big problem I'm not seeing.

Another minor problem is that the use of some DNS resolver that's not on
the same country as the user (OpenDNS, for instance) will result in a
incorrect guess by the server.


Cheers

[0]
http://cvs.debian.org/*checkout*/webwml/english/mirror/Mirrors.masterlist
[1] http://www.de.debian.org/dmc/today/
[2] git://git.debian.org/~costela/mirror_picker.git

-- 
Leo "costela" Antunes
[insert a witty retort here]


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