Re: sunsite.org.uk - rsync access to cd-images
On Thu, 19 Aug 1999, Philip Charles wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Aug 1999, Philip Hands wrote:
>
> > > > You need enough room spare to have two copies of the largest file you're
> > > > rsyncing.
> > >
> > > Wouldn't be easier to build an image with YACS and then rsync that? Or
> > > have I missed something?
> >
> > I think that's effectively what we're talking about.
> >
> > 1) create some sort of image that's close enough
> >
> > 2) rsync the official one on top
> >
> > It seems that step 1) could probably be achieved by cat-ing the package files
> > together (with a bit of padding), which would probably be fairly quick, and
> > doesn't require anything more than the list of packages.
> >
> > We should be able to do this in a simple script, in which case we can have
> > people do it without having them have to install anything more than rsync
> > itself. That way people that don't actually run Linux might have some chance
> > of doing it, and we could request that our mirrors use it as a mirroring
> > method, especially since all the CD image mirrors generally mirror the full
> > archive too.
>
> I see the main advantage is getting *official* CD images onto a far
> greater number of mirrors. If the mirrors can be persuaded to run the
> scripts to create the padded and cat-ed files. Of course they would have
> to be able to use rsync.
>
> As far as the end user is concerned they will either have to download the
> CD images or the archive, which would take about the same ammout of time.
> If they download the archive, then they may as well install from that. A
> group of people may want to cooperate and in that case the images would be
> the way to go. If I were starting from scratch these days I would do an
> ftp install and maintain my system using the same method.
Hmmm... I think the end user's problem is disk-space. And they won't know just
what to download -- Debian is biiig. Besides, there are no symlinks in WinXX
so binary-all stuff is doomed to go wrong. (I'm talking about users switching
from WinXX to Debian.) So instead of downloading the archive that they don't
understand and that won't fit on their discs once Debian is installed, they
download the CD images. Everyone knows how to burn a CD ;-)
So if you think a bit, it's probably understandable that there are vast
numbers of users/distributors who are downloading entire images by FTP. This
means an enormous load on the very few CD image mirrors. If we could offer
those people a method that lightens this load and is also faster (far more
_package_ servers are available), they might refrain from using FTP to a
server on the other side of the world.
(Another nice thing about a CD is that you can make copies for your friends;
you don't make copies of your harddisk. So maybe we should encourage people to
write _Official_ CD's... ;-)
> > Hm, I wonder how much effort it would be to patch rsync to take a list of
> > extra files from which to try and find the download data. That way, we could
> > just point rsync at the .deb's in the ftp archive, and it could pick out the
> > data it needed, without the image build step.
> >
> Is there a port of rsync for win users?
Just found:
http://www.steffensiebert.de/ports/rsync.html
and
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~msteveb/rsync/index.html
Could someone verify that they actually work? And possibly write a simple "do
it this way" scheme like this, for the Debian webpages:
1. Get rsync from http://xxxxx/rsync.exe
2. Get <helperprogram> from http://xxx
3. Install <helperprogram> by unzipping & running setup.exe
4. Open a DOS window
5. Go to dir in which images are that should be updated
6. Enter "rsync --dry-run server::xxxx"
7. If that goes well, run "rsync server:xxxx"
Of course I just made up this example, but you know what I mean. And don't
forget Win-users are quite stupid sometimes, so you'll have to spell it out
for them ;-)
There's also wget for Win32 on
http://sunsite.auc.dk/wget/index.html
Could someone please verify that
wget -O outputfile ftp://server/file
works correctly (this is what would be needed in the pseudo-cd creation script
-- ehh... batch file ;-)
AFAI can see it's a simple binary and no complicated procedures are needed
here.
Regards,
Anne Bezemer
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