Re: cdn.debian.net as a project service?
On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 11:08:15AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 3:55 AM, Michael Vogt <mvo@debian.org> wrote:
>
> > There is a "mirror" method in apt since some time that is a bit of a
> > combined cdn/README.mirrors approach. Its not much used and probably
> > has some rough edges but should be a good starting point.
> >
> > The idea is that you have a sources.list entry like:
> > deb mirrors://mirrors.debian.org/mirror sid main
> >
> > and the server returns a list of "good" mirrors (based on something
> > like geoip) for your location as a simple text list. This is done on
> > apt-get update. After that it uses a selected miror of that list to do
> > the actual update and for getting the packages. The list is stored
> > locally in /var/lib/apt/mirrors so that a re-query is not needed for
> > each download request. It supports fallback to the next mirror if
> > there are problems and also reporting back issues (via a external
> > helper).
> >
> > One missing feature is that it needs to send along info about the
> > release/arch its looking for or the returned list needs to be extended
> > to include this info. But otherwise it should be good and working.
>
> Looks like the main thing missing for this to work is an
> implementation of the server?
Yeah. There is a implementation around launchpad of the simple
protocol, I don't know much about it, but cache-country-mirrors.txt is
probably a good starting point in the LP source.
> What is the protocol?
The current implementation will just hit the http url
http://mirrors.debian.org/mirror and read a list of base urls from
it. Like:
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian
http://ftp.tu-clausthal.de/pub/linux/debian/
As mentioned before it should be extended to either include the
(release,arch) in the request or the server needs to add it to the
returned data.
> Maybe this would be a good gsoc project?
Sounds good to me, I'm not much of a server guy but I could certainly
help with improving the client side of apt.
Cheers,
Michael
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