minimizing the impact of bad mirrors (was: mirror debian.tu-bs.de out of date)
On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 09:54:55AM +0200, Paul Menzel wrote:
> since 5 days I did not get any new list of packages from
> debian.tu-bs.de.
I will notice them.
> So today I investigated this issue and found [1] and [2], which shows
> that the mirror has not been update since July 16th.
>
> As a workaround I added ftp.de.debian.org to my sources list.
>
> My questions are the following.
>
> 1. Is there a feature in apt (aptitude/apt-get) which notifies the user,
> if a the respective mirror has not been updated for some time?
The first problem is that would not be relevant for the stable version
(a mirrors may not be updated anymore but would be still relevant for
stable).
The problem is that many other kind of issues can happen on the mirror,
and checking the last date of project/trace/ftp-master.debian.org is
clearly not be sufficient (an arch may stop being updated for example).
Basically, all the needed tests should be present on
http://teubr.eu.org/~spaillar/debian/qamirrors/TODO (whose I should
create a wiki page instead ..). Don't hesitate to add anything that you
consider relevant.
> Would it be useful to file a wishlist bug?
We have to carefully think at the several solutions.
One of these is implementing a DNS round robin of mirrors, regurarly
updated, only composed of working and fresh mirrors.
As a first step, I submitted #483957 so that the authorative list of
mirrors get included in the sources.list and /or in the man
sources.list.
Obvisouly, that supposes the list at
http://www.debian.org/mirrors/list is always consistent with reality
(and that is not the case since we still do hand test/mail/list
edition).
> 2. Is there a protocol a user should follow, if he notices, that a
> mirror has not been updated? Is there a special list or a standard
> e-mail-address to contact?
A/ Report a bug against the 'mirrors' pseudopackage.
B/ Or contact mirrors@debian.org (A/ is better)
> 3. Is this written down somewhere, e. g. wiki.debian.org?
A/ http://bugs.debian.org/ -> http://www.debian.org/Bugs/pseudo-packages
B/ http://www.debian.org/contact
"We also have a complete list of different jobs and e-mails to use to
contact various parts of the organization."
==> http://www.debian.org/intro/organization then search mirrors, you
got the mirrors team email.
> 4. To avoid such scenarios, is it recommended to have always to package
> mirrors listed in sources.list?
Sorry, I don't understand your question. Do you mean "two (2) mirrors" ?
IMO, you should stick to the official ftp.XX.debian.org or
push-secondary like the one you used ...
Best regards.
--
Simon Paillard
mirrors@debian.org
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