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Re: What would it take to establish a mirror of cdimage.debian.org in North America?

Thanks Philip, for the thoughtful reply.
Of course, jigdo is the "correct" way to do it. But jigdo is complex to use (I've done it, but I couldn't explain it to my nephew when he wanted to do it.) And jigdo outputs to standard-out lots of minimally informative stuff while it's working, unless you shut it up, then it's *too* quiet...
Perhaps the right thing to do here is to go to work on Steve McIntyre's fuse thingie and get it ready for prime-time. 

Steve?  Is it in a shape that somebody could look at it?

Rick

On Oct 27, 2012, at 2:49 AM, Philip Hands wrote:


Hi Rick,

Rick Thomas <rbtfrog@gmail.com> writes:
Fetching a DVD image across the North Atlantic takes a long time -- 5-7 hours. 

And the bit-torrent seeders don't provide the beta images, let alone
the daily or weekly images.
This is not the answer to the question asked, but if you're downloading 
a daily image over HTTP or FTP then you're almost certainly doing it
wrong.

If you regularly play with these images then you've probably got a
fairly recent one laying around, in which case you could use rsync for a 
much faster download, but if you want to be kind to cdimage.debian.org
the right thing to do is use jigdo, which will pull almost all of the
image from your nearest mirror, in form of packages, and then assemble
them into the image locally.  If you have an old DVD image, you can
mount that and offer it to jigdo as a source of packages, saving even
more bandwidth.


So... are there any volunteers out there to provide a mirror of
cdimage.debian.org/cdimage on this side of the pond?  How big a
machine would it require?  How much bandwidth?


That said, I'd imagine that a US-ian mirror would be helpful to people
that cannot be bothered to work out how to do the right thing.
It is possible that one could be smarter than simply mirroring the whole 
lot, since for some of the images it may be that you find that nobody
ever tries to download them from you, so the act of mirroring them would 
simply add load to cdimage.debian.org.

Steve McIntyre proposed a while ago (and I think did some work on) a
FUSE file system that would take jigdo files and a local mirror, and
provide the illusion of a cdimage mirror without needing the images
locally.  If you could implement that then any mirror willing to run
that FUSE filesystem could provide the content you're looking to mirror, without consuming the bandwidth or disk space required to really do that. 

Cheers, Phil.
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