Re: where to sync from?
On Wed, Mar 21, 2007 at 02:12:26PM -0400, Ricardo Yanez wrote:
> I must thank you for such upfront and honest description of things. As
> an old-time mirror admin (started 1999) I have felt many times
> abandonment and incomprehension from Debian. Debian is still a
> non-profit, volunteer-based organization, so I won't judge or complain.
> After all, I chose Debian, and committed to it, for that very reason.
Well, I can't say I agree with that. I used to sympathise with that
attitude, but now I don't any more. Yes, we are all volunteers, and
yes, we don't strive to make profit; but that doesn't have to mean that
we can't strive for excellence.
Over here in Europe, where those of us had more interest and more leeway,
we set up syncproxy.eu.debian.org, and today it's pushing 26 sites, mostly
official mirrors and a few build daemons. I think we can be proud with that.
> I myself, knowing first hand how the mirror structure works, choose
> without hesitating a ftp.[].debian.org mirror depending on where I am.
> Prejudice? perhaps, but I tend to blame it on gut instinct. Whatever says
> debian.org gives me instant confidence.
Yes, well, that is the whole point of ftp.*.debian.org - they are there so
that our users can rely on them.
There may be faster local mirrors, but an official ftp.*.d.o mirror is
always decent, too.
> Bottom line, there is a lot of willing bandwidth out there that is not
> properly used to balance the load. What if admins of the same country
> subscribed to this list joined in effort?
We definitely need that.
In the United States, there seems to be an entrenched fear that becoming
part of ftp.us.d.o would take so much resources that something Bad(tm) would
happen sooner or later. However, that really doesn't have to be the case.
I asseret that there can be found a sufficient number of people who can
volunteer proper hardware, bandwidth and manpower to run a series of mirrors
which could join the rotation (be it DNS round-robin or something else).
I mean, okay, maybe I'm biased because I saw a bunch of crazy Swedes over
there in Umea who used to run the mirror on a cluster of tiny AIX-powered
machines (hi maswan! :). But it doesn't have to be done specifically like
that, there are a number of different ways to make it happen.
> Just to pull an example. I just recently, based on this discussion, payed
> attention to the Brazil mirror. Looking at the mirror list, one sees there
> are seven (7!) mirrors in Brazil. One immediately wonders why these 7
> could not join forces, much like the US three official mirrors, into one
> potent rotation of mirrors? Three of them even come from the same
> university! See the point?
Quite. I don't know exactly how large that university is (it might span
different cities?), but it's duplication of work in any case.
> Chile has two mirrors, our own and debian.ubiobio.cl. Couldn't we do the
> same as the ftp.us.debian.org mirrors do? BTW, is the admin of
> debian.ubiobio.cl subscribed to this list? Then there wouldn't be any
> mirrors looked down upon.
I don't know, let's see if they respond :) If not, you can try contacting
them at the address you can find by googling for debian.ubiobio.cl
Maintainer Mirrors.masterlist.
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
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