[mirror-admin] missing and extraneous files at kernel.org

[Chris Schanzle]

On 08/10/2009 05:24 PM, J.H. wrote:
> Carlos Carvalho wrote:
>   
>> J.H. (warthog19 at eaglescrag.net) wrote on 8 August 2009 15:00:
>>  >We don't, and never have, included any of the index.html files from 
>>  >upstream, that will not be fixed,
>>
>> Why? That sounds arbitrary. If you're a tier-1 mirror you should
>> replicate upstream, not decide on its contents. You can only exclude
>> whole portions of the tree due to resource limitation. This is not the
>> case for a few small files.
>>     
>
> In fact it is not arbitrary, and completely intentional.  Upstream 
> distro providers have a large number of people who have access to their 
> repositories, and I have an automated sync process.  Explicitly dropping 
> index.html files means several things:
>
> 	1) When a user browses to a page on mirrors.kernel.org they are
> 	   guaranteed that what they are seeing was generated from the
> 	   file listing, not by a rogue index.html page.  This means the
> 	   users can implicitly trust what they are seeing.
>
> 	2) It means I'm not unintentionally hosting websites under the
> 	   mirrors that I either don't know about or don't want to be
> 	   hosting.  I've got a lot of server / bandwidth resources I'm
> 	   sure there's a botnet somewhere that would love to sneak
> 	   something on there, I'm just trying to make things more
> 	   obvious if/when something like that does happen.
>
> 	3) This also means that I don't propagate these things to
> 	   mirrors who are mirroring from me.
>   

Skin the cat another way?  Disable Apache's sending index.html (I think 
DirectoryIndex in your httpd.conf) for the mirror tree directories.

IMHO, I think you should mirror everything upstream provides.  Besides, 
John, who's more authoritative to the public than kernel.org?  :-)


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