Re: where to sync from?
On Thu, 2007-03-22 at 14:02 +0100, Mattias Wadenstein wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Mar 2007, Ricardo Yanez wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 2007-03-21 at 22:34 +0100, Josip Rodin wrote:
> >> On Wed, Mar 21, 2007 at 02:45:10PM -0400, Ricardo Yanez wrote:
> >>> Coming back to my previous message, it seems to me that uniting mirror
> >>> admins is a way to go, and that the Debian mirror and submission pages
> >>> could help in bringing mirrors together, am I right? Maybe it's not
> >>> technically possible?
> >>
> >> How do you mean?
> >>
> >
> > I mean the following: Most, if not all, mirrors start by being local.
> > Then at some point the admin(s) decide to submit the information to
> > Debian, making them sort of public and part of Debian. In reality the
> > mirror still supplies a local need, because people still choose
> > ftp.*.debian.org mirrors, as discussed, when installing or otherwise. My
> > suggestion is to change this and ask for a higher commitment than just
> > making the mirror public. I suggest a model much like the NTP pool, that
> > is, you submit your server and agree to become part of ftp.*.debian.org
> > for your country. Do 'nslookup us.pool.ntp.org' and you'll see what I
> > mean (cl, br, whatever). This would really help unload the heavily
> > loaded, and local mirrors really become part of Debian. If I make my
> > mirror public it's because I'm willing to sacrifice bandwidth in the
> > first place, right?
>
> The problem with this (also seen in http.us.d.o) is that bad things happen
> when they are out of sync wrt updates. Imagine where you get Packages.gz
> from one mirror, and then try to get the debs referenced from another that
> has not updated yet, you'll get lots of 404s.
>
Yes, I do understand the mirror structure is a complete mess, as is now,
but then again, why would all mirrors in a country sync with the master,
or Fiji, Canary Islands or whatever, isn't that just a horrendous waste
of resources? Take the Brazil official mirror, why would any other
Brazilian mirror, for heavens sake, sync with anything else than that
mirror?
If a mirror supplies a local need, great, but does it really help Debian
to have this mirror in a list when in practice it still is a local
mirror?
Josip told us about the European sync proxy. That's neat! A shining star
in all this.
> One thing you will get by being an official mirror is to be included in
> the mirror-chooser selection in the installer, that might help split
> traffic between different mirrors too, despite not all of them being
> ftp.*.d.o.
>
Exactly my point. In the installer you're presented with a mile-long
list of mirrors, with names that most of the time make no sense, then
quiet naturally you choose the ftp.*.debian.org for your country,
leaving the rest of mirror useless, although, I presume, most of them
are quite legit and could do the job equally well. That's not really
splitting the traffic.
Ricardo Yanez
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