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Re: Automatic mirror selection



Adam Borowski wrote:
> you can also get a "geoip-city-lite" database which appears to be dfsg free
> once you purge nondistributable parts about ISPs (city and ISP data is
> intermingled in a single file).  That could perhaps provide some better
> resolution than just country.

I thougth about this too, but we don't currently have reliable city
information for the mirrors, so it would demand more work and wouldn't
bring big benefits, since it's already not certain that the user's
country's mirror will actually be any faster than an inter-country link,
I decided that going for a country based approach was the best
middle-ground bet. We'd have even less certainty about the user's city's
mirror performance.

> Uhm, and how exactly do you get the arch?  At DNS time you don't have
> anything but the requester's or his ISP's IP.

This would have to be placed inside sources.list at some point, then I
figure the automatic or manual process responsible should stick
"dpkg-architecture -qDEB_BUILD_ARCH" somewhere in there, so you just
have to query "<arch>.geomirror.d.net", for instance, to get the best
mirror for your country which contains your arch.
It could be during D-I, if the D-I people like the idea and no big
problems arise from a testing period.

> Would a vserver, one IP and a NS delegation for a test subdomain be enough
> for your tests?  No fallover or anything, though.

Yes, certainly. Do you have one available?
The only needed things are:
- pdns-backend-pipe
- libgeo-ip-perl


> What about this:
>   ftptest.debian.net CNAME debian.XXX
>   debian.XXX NS your_vserver.XXX
> (where XXX is any domain you can control without bothering the DSA for every
> change)

I don't think that'll work. Since the Debian nameserver won't find a
break in the SOA line (introduced with a NS entry), it'll try to find
YYY.ftptest.d.net directly. A CNAME entry on an upper-level domain won't
be enough to "redirect" the lower-level domains.
But I'm no DNS specialist, so if you (or anyone) have a more specific
way of making this work, I'm all ears!



Thanks for the feedback!

Cheers

-- 
Leo "costela" Antunes
[insert a witty retort here]

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