[mirror-admin] Outdated mirrors? / syncing against RH-masters directly

[Rob van Nieuwkerk]

On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:25:06 -0500
Matt Domsch <Matt_Domsch at dell.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 04:53:06PM -0300, Carlos Carvalho wrote:
> > Matt Domsch (Matt_Domsch at dell.com) wrote on 16 July 2008 14:19:
> >  >A config change on the Duke mirror left the account running the
> >  >cronjobs unable to run cronjobs.  This has now been fixed.
> >  >
> >  >Separately, the iBiblio mirror was also stale (since 9-July).
> > 
> > Just the two tier-0 ones. Oops...
> 
> Indeed.  Interestingly, of the ~150 public mirrors, ~110 were still
> listed as being up-to-date, meaning they were syncing from
> download*.f.r.c directly, and not using tiering.  Which is disappointing.

Hi Matt,

I certainly wish to use download*.f.r.c directly for my mirror
(ftp://alviss.et.tudelft.nl) and I was quite worried about losing access
when the tier-system was announced.  I've considered becoming a tier-0
myself or stop running my mirror (which has been available for almost
10 years).  I don't want to be dependent on intermediate mirrors.
I want to run a good mirror.  Or no mirror at all.

Having direct access to the RH master I can:

- always be very up-to-date & accurate (I use a whole set of scripts to
  sync different parts of the Fedora tree frequently, independently
  & fast).  Many mirrors just only do a single complete tree sync once
  a day.  Being fine-grained & frequent greatly improves the quality
  of my mirror.  And I have proper locking in place so there is never
  running more than one rsync on any part of the tree.  Many mirrors
  just blindly run rsync from cron and create a mess in their mirror
  when a new one is started before the previous one has finished ..

- notice problems on the master(s) and report them to RH early before
  it propagates to many downstream mirrors (and my users).
  I keep an eye on log output from my scripts, and I'm running a
  *dedicated* Fedora mirror, nothing else.  Many mirrors contain
  many different distributions/software etc.  Their maintainers can
  (understandably !) never give the same level of attention to all
  this content.

- control exactly which master I use.  I use IP-numbers and no
  DNS addresses.  I don't trust DNS for accessing the RH master mirror:
  it's too easy to mess with DNS (and thus present a mirror with a
  rogue master with manipulated content).  Very often masters are not in
  sync and because of the round-robin DNS addresses content would start
  ping-pong-ing.  This problem btw even happens with the load-balancing
  stuff RH uses behind the fixed IP masters (reported several times)
  but it's much less frequent.
  And in case of master problems I can switch to a different one because
  I can see/verify that something is wrong.

- avoid being being subject to hardware or management problems of
  intermediate mirrors.  If one takes good care of his/her own mirror
  introducing any extra hop(s) decreases quality and "up-to-date-ness".

- in case of new releases get my mirror "ready for bitflip" very soon
  (by doing things by hand & sucking it out of RH and other sources and
  syncing against the RH-master).  This way I can notice release problems
  soon (and report them to RH), carefully check all the content and make
  good release content available to many downstream mirrors.

- because of this (and of course having a well-managed & secure system
  running on good hardware) provide a reliable, fast & up-to-date mirror
  to my many happy downstream mirrors & users.
  And yes: of course I like to have a nice mirror for updating & installing 
  Fedora myself too ! .. :-)

	friendly greetings,
	Rob van Nieuwkerk

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