[mirror-admin] Fedora 12 release day - bitflip & report

[Chris Schanzle]

On 11/17/2009 08:12 AM, Matt Domsch wrote:
> The public announcement of availability of Fedora 12 will happen in
> about 2 hours, but the directory permissions on
> releases/12/{Fedora,Live}/ are open now.

Hi Matt,

I wanted to express how well I think this release went from my 
perspective.  The change to make Everything/ to be available in advance 
allowed me, as a private mirror w/o direct rsync access, to have a very 
efficient & quick final rsync at release time.  Also, making the 
.torrents available (but hidden until release time) and having the 
trackers running allowed me to get the ISOs the night before release and 
have them on the server for actual release time.  It also allowed me to 
add to the torrent capacity at release time, even the modest 15mbits I 
can give is modest in the grand scheme, it's what I can do from home 
(bittorrent is banned at work).

The final rsync went quickly except for a few areas.  I could help 
myself next time by picking apart a netinst.iso (or other boot iso) and 
pre-populate Fedora/*/os/images/ - about 200MB for each arch.

I also found several sub-optimal hard-linking between Everything and 
Fedora trees.

The biggest offender was that kernels (~20MB each) were not hard-linked, 
but could have been.  E.g.,
./Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/kernel-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.x86_64.rpm
    ./Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/kernel-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.x86_64.rpm

./Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/kernel-debug-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.x86_64.rpm
    ./Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/kernel-debug-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.x86_64.rpm


A few non-kernel same-arch files were dups but not linked.  E.g.,
./Everything/i386/os/Packages/perf-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.noarch.rpm
    ./Fedora/i386/os/Packages/perf-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.noarch.rpm


Not an Everything+Fedora issue, but pair of drpms in separate arch 
directories could've been linked:
  ./Everything/i386/os/drpms/koan-1.6.6-2.fc12_2.0.0-1.fc12.noarch.drpm 
./Everything/x86_64/os/drpms/koan-1.6.6-2.fc12_2.0.0-1.fc12.noarch.drpm

Perhaps running a tool on the 'final' Everything + Fedora trees to 
identify hard-linkable files would be helpful just before release.


Finally, it would be helpful if the torrent ISO images had the same 
modification timestamps as what is in the Fedora/*/isos/ directories.  
That would avoid rsync from checking the checksums in the files, which 
requires intensive I/O on the already busy rsync servers.  I'd be 
confident in the torrent isos' integrity after checking gpg signatures 
on the *CHECKSUM files and checking sha256sum's.  Using rsync 
--size-only on those can help reset timestamps quickly, but it'd be nice 
to not worry about it in the first place.

Thanks!

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