progress on top level parts of the hierarchy [was Re: where to sync from?]

[Josip Rodin <joy@entuzijast.net>]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2007 at 10:42:17PM +0100, Josip Rodin wrote:
> > So, the logical thing to do here would be to get your two mirrors, which
> > are the official mirrors for two large countries, pushed from either
> > ftp-master.debian.org or from one of the ftp.us.debian.org sites.
> > But, I don't have any idea how to do that, because a) nobody cares to do
> > these things b) the sites are mostly overloaded anyway so they would
> > probably be slow to sync from, unless some special arrangements were made.
> > 
> > I guess that now that I spent time writing this mail, I could have another
> > go at trying to find out which debian-admin member now tends after these
> > things, and see if anything can be changed.
> 
> As it turns out, Ryan Murray promptly handled the latest submission from
> Gunnar Wolf about ftp.mx.d.o, and he's as feisty as ever ;) so we'll
> actually make progress about this.
> 
> Also, I sent Carlos Carvalho instructions to see if he can sync efficiently
> from syncproxy.wna.d.o, and if that goes all right, that will probably be
> done too.

In the meantime, we were stuck, but a couple of days ago I guilted down
James :) and he decided to create a mirroradm group on the relevant machines
and let its members tend to stuff. Yay! Obviously this doesn't mean that
I'll now go on a rampage of pushing people :) but it opens a door to
progress.

I'm looking for other volunteers who are also developers who are willing
to learn what it takes to elevate mirrors to ftp.*.d.o status, and to be
members of that group (so that we don't have a single point of failure
situation again).

Simon Paillard is the obvious candidate, but not a DD, but that won't have
to be a very large obstacle, because he's going to get an account in the
Request Tracker so that he can do the thinking part of the work, and then
leave the technical execution (editing a few config files and scripts) to
someone else.

The point is that we establish a process of deliberation to decide these
things, and a process of executing them, all of which are sufficiently well
defined and self-contained so that they don't depend on harassing people
like debian-admin (or even leader) for whom this is not a priority, nor
does it have to be, really.

Candidates for ftp.ca.d.o are discussed at some length in #329837.
Anyone who wants to help should go over http://www.debian.org/mirror/official
and create a comparative list of features that each of those four sites
have, so that it can be decided without much ambiguity which sites are best
for the job.

If that goes all right, I intend to have a review of ftp.us.d.o/http.us.d.o
(mind - different content in those two round-robins!), because that's been
having problems for a while now.

Note that James has already been internally scouting for a new ftp.d.o :)
just in case anyone was wondering what to do with that old thing.
It will also benefit the cause of deprecating ftp.d.o that we have
fully functional ftp.us.d.o and ftp.ca.d.o, so let's do those things right
and make ftp.d.o a non-issue.

-- 
Josip Rodin
mirrors@debian.org