debian mirror redirector - wish list suggestion...

[Rick Thomas <rbthomas@pobox.com>]

Hi!

Thanks for the redirector.  It’s an awesome piece of work!

I have a suggestion that might benefit a small percentage of your users (myself included) but should (I think!) be fairly easy/cheap to implement…

Here’s my situation:

I get IPv4 service from my local ISP (Wave Broadband).  They have no plans to provide IPv6 service in the foreseeable future.

So I get IPv6 service via a SIXXS tunnel.  The nearest SIXXS tunnel endpoint to me (I’m in the Seattle, WA, USA area) is in Chicago (IL, USA).  So any IPv6 connection has to go to Chicago before it can go anywhere else.  Seattle to Chicago and back adds about 60-90 ms to round-trip-times and restricts the available bandwidth significantly.

I use IPv6 when I can for “normal” web and email as a way of getting ready for the future and helping the community to spot bugs.

But for bulk data transfer (such as debian apt will do from time-to-time; another example is downloading debian installer CD/DVD images) it’s much faster to use IPv4 when I have the option.

When I use http://httpredir.debian.org/demo.html, it sees that I’m using IPv6 and gives me a set of mirrors that I can only get to by IPv6.


So here’s my request:

Add an IPv6-only and an IPv4-only DNS alias for httpredir.debian.org (e.g. “ipv4redir.debian.org” and “ipv6redir.debian.org”) so that I can specify which protocol I want to use.

Thanks!

Rick