[mirror-admin] ISO best practice FTP?

[J.H.]

On 03/09/2011 11:38 AM, Brian Long wrote:
> It used to be best practice to use an Apache RewriteRule to redirect all
> .iso downloads on a Mirror to FTP.  Do people still recommend this or
> are you allowing Apache to serve up the ISOs directly?

There really hasn't been any point in doing this since Apache was able
to use sendfile().  Ftp has a number of drawbacks given the general way
the web is currently hobbled and duct taped together.  The biggest of
these being the fact that FTP doesn't traverse NAT / most firewalls well.

> I own a private mirror for Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc. and I
> have a conf snippet as follows:
> 
> KeepAlive On
> KeepAliveTimeout 2
> MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
> 
> RewriteEngine On
> RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} GET
> RewriteRule ^(.*\.iso)$ ftp://<hostname>.cisco.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Assuming your using a web server that is capable of using sendfile(), I
would argue this is extra overhead and complication for little gain.

- John 'Warthog9' Hawley
Chief Kernel.org Administrator

--