Re: ftp1.us.debian.org and FTP mirrors
On Thu, 22 Oct 1998 servis@purdue.edu wrote:
> *- Avery Pennarun wrote about "Re: ftp1.us.debian.org and FTP mirrors"
> | On Thu, Oct 22, 1998 at 10:07:52PM +1000, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> |
> | > On Thu, Oct 22, 1998 at 01:31:58PM +0200, Federico Di Gregorio wrote:
> | > > What about having postinst scan your fqdn and uncomment the right
> | > > entry in the conffile? (And having all the other sites present
> | > > and commented).
> | >
> | > Sounds nice to me. However, being in the same country is not necessarily
> | > good enough; ftp.au.debian.org is absolutely shocking from here
> | > (> 3 second pings), but apparently just fine if you're in the same city
> | > or on the other backbone or something. I would be better off using
> | > ftp.de.debian.org for example. On the other hand, mirror.aarnet.edu.au
> | > is just great (< 120ms).
> |
> | Look at my netselect package, which chooses the "fastest" server from an
> | arbitrary set of supplied names. I designed it exactly for this. Version
> | 0.2 actually works. It merely needs to be integrated into APT somehow...
> |
>
> Without looking at the package and how it works I want to make a few
> comments. I think this whole idea of choosing a mirror that is close
> and fast is a great idea. However the code must take into account that
> a majority of people may not have dedicated net connections, real dns
> host names or even be connected when they install. One approach would
> be to use the timezone information to pick an appropriate mirror. Of
> course the timezone of the mirror would have to be stored in the mirror
> info. Wasn't Jason working on a new Package file format for the mirror
> list. Hopefully a Timezone field will be included in there.
>
Maybe you should look at the package :-) It's much more sophisticated
that than, working on ping times, and ping throughput percentages.
Timezone information is a pretty hopeless heuristic, really. It's far
better to simply defer the run of netselect until the user is on the net.
I.e., a message says 'when you next dial up, run apt-configure and tell it
to use netselect'.
Jules
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