Re: ftp-master, ftp and db .debian.org moving - hosting sought
Olaf van der Spek <olafvdspek@gmail.com> writes:
> On 6/22/05, Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org> wrote:
>>
>> [Olaf van der Spek]
>> > I've been wondering, would it be an idea (for the long-term) to use
>> > (more) distributed ... or p2p concepts to reduce the dependency and
>> > load on central servers?
>>
>> Please give some specific examples of what you mean.
>
> I'm not sure how exactly the current mirrors work, but syncing
> (primary) mirrors between eachother instead of all from a master may
> be an idea.
Mirrors are stacked in a tree (and even graph for some that use
fallbacks) and pushes travel along the mirror network down this
tree. The Mirrors.masterlist (apt-get source base-config) file
contains a line where a mirror updates from.
>> I hope you aren't suggesting that the mirror network be replaced by
>> bittorrent. That would suck for just about everybody.
>
> I'd not immediately suggest replacing it by BT, but using (or at least
> looking at) BT-like concepts may certainly be an interesting idea.
cdimage.d.o uses bt now for its images.
But BT has limitations. Esspecialy with the number of files to
share. A tracker that coordinates a full debian mirror would have to
be insanely huge. Also P2P tend to ignore the geography of the
network. It is much better to download debs from one local mirror than
connect all over the world to countless users.
One thing that might be intresting though is replacing mirrors with
smart caches. Act like a proxy with prefetching for commonly used
packages.
MfG
Goswin
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