Re: cdn.debian.net as a project service?
Peter Palfrader wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Mar 2011, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
>> There's one thing that worries me, though: it requires there to be one
>> central server that can be used to do a redirect. That's a single point
>> of failure, which is risky in various ways. Would it be possible to take
>> all the logic and data required to choose a mirror and put them into apt
>> instead? Possibly as a second phase of development?
>
> The service should be almost state-less, so putting it on two, three or
> four machines all over the place should be quite easy to do.
Yes, that's exactly one of the reasons why I asked if DSA would support
something like this service. My plan is to host a few redirectors and use
geoDNS to send users to a hopefully close redirector.
Even though the use of geoDNS is one of geoDNS-based mirrors' weak points,
in this case it is not very important. Unless explicitly disabled, Apt uses
keep-alive therefore reducing the connection setup overhead.
Centralizing the service has many benefits. They include:
* single place to update the mirrors list,
* mirror health checks are cheaper and everyone benefits. Implementing such
checks locally would either be too slow (waiting for timeouts, for example),
or would consume more bandwidth if done aggressively.
* shared-knowledge for load balancing and broken mirrors detection,
* you just use it, no setup, everything is transparent[1]
[1] the current implementation is not even "beta," but Md and I have
discussed what would need to be done to play nicely with proxies and will
keep them in mind when developing.
However, if anyone insists, you can always fetch the redirector's code and
run it locally. There's no need to hack apt :)
Cheers,
--
Raphael Geissert - Debian Developer
www.debian.org - get.debian.net
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