Measure Debian mirror responsiveness (Was: possible new official mirror in the US)

[Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@rosebud.ml.org>]

  Vincent> Alternative solution: Someone writes a "dping", similar to Quake
  Vincent> server browsers but that would display the list of debian mirrors
  Vincent> sites sorted by responsiveness. _(;

  Joey>  Done. It's currenty in the chris-cust package, and will soon move
  Joey> into the mirror package.

Yep. Joey brought this to my attention, and forwarded me Chris Lameter's
checkmirr script.  I have polished it a little, mostly by rewriting it in
perl. In the process, I got rid from a dependency on ncftp (Chris) or wget
(Joey) so that it can be a part of the mirror package without requiring
another Depends:.

I'll probably edit it a little more, write a manual package and then add it
to the mirror package. Anyway, as it's so small, I include a working version.

Alas, I am not sure show valid this really is --- a ping snapshot is not a
good estimator of what effective throughput really is. But then, what is ?

Comments welcome, Dirk


#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# debian-mirrors	measure ping time to all mirrors in README.mirrors
#
# downloads README.mirrors from ftp.debian.org (but not if a local file is
# pointed to), runs fping on all Debian mirrors, sorts the result by ping 
# time and output the 'n' (default is 20) fastest
#
# Written by Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org> and released under the GPL
# $Id: debian-mirrors.pl,v 1.2 1998/02/05 03:47:28 edd Exp $

## Yes, Net::FTP is much cooler, but we don't want to depend on libnet-perl
## 'ftp.pl' is provided by the mirror package
unshift( @INC, "/usr/lib/mirror" );
require 'ftp.pl';

#use strict;			# doesn't work with ftp.pl
use English;
use File::Basename;
use vars qw($opt_h $opt_f $opt_v);
use Getopt::Std;
use IPC::Open2;

my $tempfile = "/tmp/".$file."-".$$;
my $readfrom = $tempfile;
my $max = 20;
$PROGRAM_NAME =~ s|.*/||;	# strip everything before last slash

getopts('hf:n:v') or die("Try `$PROGRAM_NAME -h` for help screen.\n");

if ($opt_h or $#ARGV != -1) {
    print "Usage:\n  $PROGRAM_NAME [options]\n";
    print "Options:\n";
    print "  -f file\tpoint to local version README.mirrors\n";
    print "  -n max\tmaximum number of mirrors to show\n";
    print "  -v\t\tverbose operation\n";
    print "  -h\t\tshow this help\n";
    exit 0;
}

$max = $opt_n if ($opt_n);

if ( ! $opt_f ) {
    my $hostname = "ftp.debian.org";
    my $account = "ftp";
    my $password = "user\@debian.org";
    my $directory = "/pub/debian";
    my $filename = "README.mirrors";
    print "Retrieving ", $filename, " for analysis.";
    ftp::debug(1) if $opt_v;	# for debugging output
    ftp::open($hostname,21,0,1) or die "No ftp connection\n";   
    ftp::login($account, $password) or die "Couldn't login\n";
    ftp::cwd($directory) or die "Cannot cd to $directory\n";
    ftp::get($filename, $tempfile, 0) or die "Could not get $file\n";
    ftp::quit();
} else {
    die "File $opt_f does not exist." unless -f $opt_f;
    $readfrom = $opt_f;
}

print "Measuring ping times to all Debian mirror sites.\n" if $opt_v;
print "Please be patient.\n" if $opt_v;
    
my ($mirror,$path,$time);

open(DATA, $readfrom) or die "Cannot open $filename\n";

open2("PINGOUT", "PINGIN", "fping -ae") or die "Cannot start fping(1)\n";;

while (<DATA>) {
    if (($mirror,$path) = ($ARG =~ m|^\s*(\S*\.\S*\.\S*.*):(/\S*)\s.*|)) {
	print "Pinging $mirror \n" if $opt_v;
	print PINGIN "$mirror\n"; # if ($mirror =~ m/.*\.edu$/);
    }
}
close(DATA);
close(PINGIN);

open2("SORTOUT", "SORTIN", "sort -n") or die "Cannot start sort(1)\n";

while (<PINGOUT>) {
    ($mirror,$time) = ($ARG =~ m|^(\S*)\s*\((\d*) msec\)|);
    print "fping reports $time for $mirror\n" if $opt_v;
    print SORTIN "$time $mirror\n";
}
close(SORTIN);
close(PINGOUT);

my $i=0;
while (<SORTOUT>) {
    print "$_" if ($i++ < $max);
}
close(SORTOUT);



-- 
edd@rosebud.ml.org                 According to the latest official figures, 
http://rosebud.ml.org/~edd      43% of all statistics are totally worthless.


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