[mirror-admin] reducing "allowed stale" time from 7 days

[Carlos Carvalho]

J.H. (warthog9 at kernel.org) wrote on 12 April 2009 17:38:
 >I would say this *shouldn't* be a problem, but if mirrors are going to 
 >be syncing more often (just to make sure they are up to date)

One way to avoid this is to make scheduled updates of the master, say
every 6h. This way everyone knows that it's useless to sync every 5min
because there'll be no changes.

One of the problems with fedora propagation is that changes to the
master are too big followed by long periods of no changes. If the
change rate were more constant it'd help mirrors to keep up-to-date.

 >then I would have to jump back on my soap box about making the rsync
 >excludes list more generic somehow and allow / force all mirrors to
 >make use of it

Forcing mirrors to do anything is quite an uphill battle... I think
the only feasible method is tiering, which limits the number of
downstream mirrors on each mirror. This way the master only accepts
tier-0 and maybe tier-1 mirrors, which are chosen among those who play
by his rules, the tier-1s only accept as tier-2s those who play by his
rules, etc. The rules can even be different, according to the mirror
load and admin patience :-)

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