[mirror-admin] Seeding newkeys with old content?

[Chuck Anderson]

On Sat, Sep 06, 2008 at 09:30:07PM +0300, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > Well the idea would be to have the master do cp -al from x to x.newkey 
> > everywhere, let the mirrors sync that with rsync -H which won't 
> > actually download anything--just hardlink the content.  Then after a 
> > day or two, replace those hardlinked files on the master with the 
> > actual new files.  Then the next rsync -H the mirrors do will only 
> > download the tiny parts of the files that changed due to the new 
> > signatures.
> > 
> > Granted, this does create a problem for those who use rsync without 
> > -H, or FTP/HTTP to mirror.  They will end up downloading everything 
> > twice.  Perhaps we should require mirrors to use rsync with -H.
> 
> The true issue here is that you would have to wait for the hardlinks
> to be created on the mirrors for populating the master with the
> changed content. The cp -a(l) on the mirror side is a better approach
> as it gives you te best of both worlds (fast sync, early updates).

True.  It does require operator intervention, however, rather than 
being fully automatic.  I think it is about time we need a 
mirror-client-side toolset that can automate some of these tasks.  I 
envision a system where the first step of a sync process downloads a 
pre-sync script from the master that handles these tasks.

rsync rsync://download.fedora.redhat.com/fedora-mirror/fedora-enchilada-pre.sh .
./fedora-enchilada-pre.sh

etc.

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