[mirror-admin] ISO best practice FTP?

[David Richardson]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2011, 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?
>
> 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]
>
> Thanks for any feedback.


That idea was based on two factors: HTTP clients and servers were unable 
to handle large files and couldn't restart a partial download.

Both of those facts have changed. Servers and clients now support >2GB 
files just fine. They support resuming a download just fine.

HTTP also gets through firewalls and NATs better than FTP. I figure if 
someone wanted to use FTP, they would have used an FTP URL. If they come 
in over HTTP, I should serve the content over HTTP.

DR

-- 
David Richardson <david.richardson at utah.edu>
Center for High Performance Computing, University of Utah
"Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?"
   -- Hamlet, Act II, Scene II

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