Re: ftp.au.debian.org
On Sat, 7 Jun 2003, Andrew Pollock wrote:
> > > Reason I ask is I'd like to propose that ftp.au.debian.org gets switched
> > > over to mirror.aarnet.edu.au instead of ftp.planetmirror.com, given Planet
> > > Mirror's provider seems to be extremely unreliable.
> >
> > Can you elaborate on this extreme unreliability, please?
>
> PlanetMirror's connectivity appears to be via iSeek (do a traceroute). I
PlanetMirror is co-located at iseek, in Brisbane, correct. Network connectivity
is via Optus (primary) and via Pacific Internet/Powertel (secondary). There
are some other network plans for diverse paths into PM we are working on but i
can't comment on them at this point.
> happen to be a colocation customer of iSeek as well. iSeek reportedly (as
> I customer I've never received an unscheduled outage notification) have
I would raise this issue with iseek directly - They have either been remiss
in not issuing you with notices - in which case they should apologise to you,
fix this and lift their act in the future - or they may not have correct
contact details for you. As a iseek customer i will say that planetmirror
has received scheduled and unscheduled outage notifications.
> issues with their border router and there's been a few (not short)
Yes, there have been some interesting cisco bugs in IOS, in part that were
tickled by the traffic that planetmirror (and therefore ftp.au.debian.org :-)
generated. As i understand it, at this point these have been resolved and/or
their core router has been pretty stable.
However Optus has had fairly serious bugs being discovered in *their* cisco
routers, both with DCEF table corruption and MPLS tag corruption. They are
investigating this in conjunction with cisco and i believe a resolution will
come out of it. Obviously with Optus having this problem it affects more than
just iseek and planetmirror.
But to address the substance of your complaint, indeed the last 4-6 weeks has
been quite horrible from a network/power point of view and reliability has
dropped below the normal 99%. I am not making excuses for the colo facility but
i also cannot see what they could have done differently to deal with some of the
issues that have occured. I do think that the worst is behind them at this point.
> PlanetMirror (and iSeek) obviously haven't heard of BCP0016/RFC2182
> insofar that they both place all their nameservers behind the one link.
Sigh, it's been on the todo list for a while. One of the issues is dealing
with !@#$! MelbourneIT, but i have expedited this over the weekend and am
expecting we (planetmirror) will have alternate DNS servers in diverse locations
next week. However your snippy observation above is certainly not particularly
helpful from my POV.
> For a long enough outage, both domains fall off the face of the DNS. As
> ftp.au.debian.org is a CNAME to ftp.planetmirror.com, so does
> ftp.au.debian.org. During such an outage, it's always nicer for a "host
> unreachable" when doing an apt-get rather than a lengthy hang on a DNS
> resolution timeout.
I agree and this will hopefully be resolved.
Was there a reason you were unwilling to mail us directly with this problem
Andrew ? I don't have issues with this going to the list but i would have
thought courtesy would at least call for contacting us first ? I am usually
quite responsive to email.
Perhaps i am reading too much into it, but if you'd prefer someone else other
than PM provide ftp.au.debian.org for whatever reason why not say that and
explain why ?
regards,
-jason
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