Hi, On Tue, 30 Aug 2005, Winston Graeme wrote:

--- houghi wrote:

...

I have updated http://houghi.org/script/makeSUSEdvd

I have added options. This means you can now do this: - select the directory where the is's are - select the directory where you want to save the dvd iso - select the directory where all stuff needs to be placed

The last can be used for e.g. network instalation.

There is also an option NOT to make the dvd iso, wich can come in handy with the last option.

e.g. makeSUSEdvd -d tmp/opensuse/10.0/B3_32/ -o /media/mp3/ -s openSUSE/test -i

Also it is possible to use real CD's instead of iso's (could be that somebody brought them to you)

Another thing I have done is re-written the recognistion of space available. (Thanks to whom has pointed it out. Don't know if you want to be named or not)

It is ready for openSUSe 10.0Beta4. Please let me know if there are other things that can be done. A GUI is something I will not be able to do.

Please test to your haerts content and let me know of any and all errors. -- houghi

http://www.opensuse.org/index.php/Making_a_DVD_from_CDs

Lots of thanks for your effort ... but I still don't understand why DVD iso's arent realeased :-( ... .

Beta3 was already 32 GB. This already is far too much for the servers - not regarding disk space, but buffer cache. With thousands of concurrent users, it is impossible to serve all files directly from the disks. The disk heads would more move than read data. So the servers get lame if they can not hold most of the most requested files in RAM during such "slashdotting" situations like we have each thursday. Best would be to even discard the CD ISO files and publish only a script which would get the files from the inst-source directory and build the CD or DVD ISOs at the user's pc. Cheers -e -- Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke@gwdg.de, em@kki.org)

On Wednesday 31 August 2005 00:52, Eberhard Moenkeberg wrote:

Beta3 was already 32 GB. This already is far too much for the servers - not regarding disk space, but buffer cache. With thousands of concurrent users, it is impossible to serve all files directly from the disks. The disk heads would more move than read data. So the servers get lame if they can not hold most of the most requested files in RAM during such "slashdotting" situations like we have each thursday.

I thought the torrents would help alleviate this problem. With the torrents, only a fraction of all downloads would come directly from the source server, and most would get the data from other downloaders. Did I miss something?

On Wednesday 31 August 2005 01:10, Simon Crute wrote:

Anders Johansson wrote:

...

...

Beta3 was already 32 GB. This already is far too much for the servers - not regarding disk space, but buffer cache. With thousands of concurrent users, it is impossible to serve all files directly from the disks. The disk heads would more move than read data. So the servers get lame if they can not hold most of the most requested files in RAM during such "slashdotting" situations like we have each thursday.

I thought the torrents would help alleviate this problem. With the torrents, only a fraction of all downloads would come directly from the source server, and most would get the data from other downloaders. Did I miss something?

At a guess, most people can get still get beter performance from from the main mirrors, than from the torrents, so there isn't enough people running the torrents.

Hm, torrents can give very good performance. Perhaps people aren't enabling upload in their clients?! BitTorrent can punish you severely in the bandwidth you get if you don't upload anything and just download One way would be to simply switch off the full ISO downloads and force people to use the torrents, along with a strongly worded note on enabling upload

Hi, On Wed, 31 Aug 2005, Anders Johansson wrote:

On Wednesday 31 August 2005 00:52, Eberhard Moenkeberg wrote:

...

Beta3 was already 32 GB. This already is far too much for the servers - not regarding disk space, but buffer cache. With thousands of concurrent users, it is impossible to serve all files directly from the disks. The disk heads would more move than read data. So the servers get lame if they can not hold most of the most requested files in RAM during such "slashdotting" situations like we have each thursday.

I thought the torrents would help alleviate this problem. With the torrents, only a fraction of all downloads would come directly from the source server, and most would get the data from other downloaders. Did I miss something?

For me, it seems like the torrents are peanuts. Ask yourself - did you use them? Have a look at http://ftp.gwdg.de/stats/webalizer/ - there you can see what ftp.gwdg.de has delivered via http the last days. Add about 1 to 2 TB a day for the sum of ftp and rsync, and you see very very clear that a relaxing effect by the torrents is simply not existing. Cheers -e -- Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke@gwdg.de, em@kki.org)

Hi, On Wed, 31 Aug 2005, Anders Johansson wrote:

On Wednesday 31 August 2005 01:18, Eberhard Moenkeberg wrote:

...

For me, it seems like the torrents are peanuts. Ask yourself - did you use them?

Yes, and if memory serves I got about 200K/s which is pretty much maxing out my DSL connection

...

Have a look at http://ftp.gwdg.de/stats/webalizer/ - there you can see what ftp.gwdg.de has delivered via http the last days. Add about 1 to 2 TB a day for the sum of ftp and rsync, and you see very very clear that a relaxing effect by the torrents is simply not existing.

Perhaps, but the question is can it be made to exist, and if so how? User education?

I guess you can't educate by telling, and not even by offering as we see. By publishing (not releasing the ISOs any other way) would result in a bad image for SUSE - "not user friendly". So the best way would be not to release ISOs at all (exception: boot.iso), but to publish a script which can build each ISO by fetching the files from the inst-source tree. Cheers -e -- Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke@gwdg.de, em@kki.org)

On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 11:20:16PM -0600, Andreas Girardet wrote:

I like your idea! To get around that one of us that knows how to (not me), can write a program that creates an iso of the install type you actually want/need by downloading the packages and use the .sel files to construct whatever iso type they want. So if you install minimal, it will be minimal, with kde it will be that and so on. And even better have a Linux, Windows and Mac (ppc) program that does it. Probably written in C#/mono? And a bittorrent type of system with trackers downloading packages in a distributed manner from ftp/http sources around the world. That way load can be distributed and so on. Kind of what jigdo does, just much more user friendly really, since our goal is to be the most user friendly / usable distro.

But as a first shot one could use jigdo. There is even a client for Windows and Mac users. If you maintain the current situation until you have implemented the perfect system you will maintain the current system forever. Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 12:31:25AM -0600, Andreas Girardet wrote:

Maybe all we currently need is a GUI jigdo client for Linux/Windows as

For Linux there is already a GUI. See my packages for SUSE 9.2 or later at http://pi3.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/~schiele/suse/. Unfortunatelly I am not aware of a Windows GUI. Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 08:34:42AM +0200, Robert Schiele wrote:

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 12:31:25AM -0600, Andreas Girardet wrote:

...

Maybe all we currently need is a GUI jigdo client for Linux/Windows as

For Linux there is already a GUI. See my packages for SUSE 9.2 or later at http://pi3.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/~schiele/suse/. Unfortunatelly I am not aware of a Windows GUI.

Won't work on my machine. I have a SUSE 9.1 -- houghi http://www.opensuse.org/index.php/Making_a_DVD_from_CDs

Hi, On Tue, 30 Aug 2005, Andreas Girardet wrote:

This issue will only get worse once we actually release. If we have issues with download speeds already now in development stages, just imagine what it will be with 10.0 going gold. Huhu! The world is waiting for SUSE 10.0 .....

The stable release has more mirrors, but those will be hit hard ........ you find this will be the Linux release of the year ...... if we are already getting these figures during our beta I expect around 50-100 times more traffic easily.

No, 10.0 will not be the release of the year. At least not over the net. Distributors have lost all their discipline. They have let the distributions explode in size, either hoping that "the mirror hierarchy" would make it to the users or simply neglecting the server load aspects. SUSE-9.3 was the last acceptable "net distribution" - with an addon in size of 16 GB (sources were released earlier). That was already a huge struggle for the servers, but ftp.gwdg.de could stand to spill out more than 70 MByte/sec continuously for almost 4 days, due to the (huge, only ftp.kernel.org has more) 12 GB RAM. That was more than 4 TByte a day. All 10.0 betas were too large for my RAM, and even with the trick to redirect all http://download.opensuse.org/*i386*iso requests to ftp.gwdg.de for getting tight enough buffer cache hits so that those isos never expired did not reach the 9.3 numbers. Tomorrow 10 am is the next beta release time, but I bet none of the mirrors will be ready at that time... I need a more "mirror hierarchy sensitive" behavior from SUSE, or - very simple - a special hardware sponsoring, a bit expensive (but cheaper than the HP sponsoring for ftp.kernel.org). ;-)) Cheers -e -- Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke@gwdg.de, em@kki.org)

Hi, On Wed, 31 Aug 2005, Andreas Girardet wrote:

...

No, 10.0 will not be the release of the year. At least not over the net.

Distributors have lost all their discipline.

They have let the distributions explode in size, either hoping that "the mirror hierarchy" would make it to the users or simply neglecting the server load aspects.

SUSE- 9.3 was the last acceptable "net distribution" - with an addon in size of 16 GB (sources were released earlier). That was already a huge struggle for the servers, but ftp.gwdg.de could stand to spill out more than 70 MByte/sec continuously for almost 4 days, due to the (huge, only ftp.kernel.org has more) 12 GB RAM. That was more than 4 TByte a day.

Really your statement is too absolute and actually quite absurd.

Ha! I am sitting here and watching what is actually happening. Not enough sleep tomight for sure. I see no chance that ftp.gwdg.de will be ready at release time. Check what would happen to the Beta4 distribution if I - reflecting the facts - would take an outage for ftp.gwdg.de and do BIOS and YAST updates and check all the filesystems in the morning...

I have heard statements like that before in the ISP industry. People saying the net will never be successfully graphical (when html was introduced), since the 2400 baud modem's and ISP backends would not handle those sizes reasonably (yes I am that old). Do you know the future of technology?

Boy, I am living the present time. Especially tonight. We wont reach the published goal. Not getting nervous about that?

Or Bill G saying the 486 will be the last and best CPU of the century. Absolute and absurd. Technology moves at a huge rate and we just need to find ways to create a distributed workload while downloading, as bittorrent or jidgo does or create servers with Terabyte of RAM, which will happen at some point. Or virtualize servers, load balance them effectively. A proper load balancer could already do the job quite nicely and redistribute the load between any mount of servers unless they have the same directory structure.

A load balancer is pretty useless if you have noone to pay for N servers. I guess you are more drunken than me at the moment.

The issue is that if the main rsync server get's hit hard no one can mirror. This needs to be adressed.

I DID address that, I guess.

A 1 CD installer as I did it solves issues also, since that is all most users need. Single addon packages can be installed seperately

Not enough; we need "more discipline" from the distributors. You know, my problem is the actual situation and not a future dream.

...

All 10.0 betas were too large for my RAM, and even with the trick to redirect all http://download.opensuse.org/*i386*iso requests to ftp.gwdg.de for getting tight enough buffer cache hits so that those isos never expired did not reach the 9.3 numbers.

the issue is that mirrors could not update from the main site in a reasonable time and that therefore everyone hit the main site. A dog that bites his own tail.

No, a SUSE dog that bites the GWDG tail.

...

Tomorrow 10 am is the next beta release time, but I bet none of the mirrors will be ready at that time...

Correct. That is the issue and not that 9.3 was the last Net distribution. What an absurd statement. The last .. yeah right!

Come on, boy, I see the behaviour of all the Linux distributors day over day. SUSE is still more "disciplined" than Debian (hazardous childs - 60 GB at once!) and MandrXXX, but IT IS ALREADY TOO MUCH, with a tendency to grow if they do not wake up. In fact it is TOO LATE to not have bad issues. Maybe you understand this. If not, you will experience it.

10.0 is huge. I don't think you realize that the market attractiveness of the Novell/SUSE proposition is the first that can effectively provide with a marketing and partner/reseller channel that only compares to very few companies in IT and certainly no single other Linux company has this kind of network. This market penetration and the huge step of creating openSUSE and allowing people to download a SUSE version on day 1 of the Gold release and not as it used to be months after it was in the shops, creates exactly the kind of hype and dynamics that will fuel our success and will create more and more successful releases. To say that 9.3 was the last one to be successfully via the net, just because of some (solvable) technical difficulties is really absurd, don't you think?

No. The "hype" is far beyond 9.3 yet. But the situation is much more worse. DUE TO THE IDIOTIC DISTRIBUTION SIZE! Crazy! Far too big! Who can stand that, tell me or shut down!

...

I need a more "mirror hierarchy sensitive" behavior from SUSE, or -very simple - a special hardware sponsoring, a bit expensive (but cheaper than the HP sponsoring for ftp.kernel.org). ;- ))

correct. Solutions and not absolute statements that are per definition a priori wrong. Simple Logic: All Swedes are blond. No I don't think so, since I actually know a few Swedes, that are not blond at all. As absurd as your statement.

Totally without help, your whole statement. More worse than that: I feel misunderstood. Best would be I would panic my kernel and reboot not before monday... Cheers -e -- Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke@gwdg.de, em@kki.org)

...

...

On Thu, Sep 1, 2005 at 12:55 pm, in message <43165169.8080806@libitum.de>, jbscout_opsubeta@libitum.de wrote: Eberhard, Andreas

maybe you both should try to meet in the middle :)

There is nothing to meet about since we are not on opposite sides IMHO. I can absolutely sense and understand E's frustrations and wish I could just send him 20 new servers + 2 F5 Big IP load balancers to go with it. I just happen to be the punching bag ;) Fine by me. At least he can air his frustration and we can all get on with surviving tomorrow. We have another month until we hit final. I have been there with servers being overloaded myself and it is not an easy situation ....... Andreas

A load balancer is pretty useless if you have noone to pay for N

servers.

I guess you are more drunken than me at the moment.

Firstly I do not drink any alcohol and am "always" sober and I have been so for years. The lucidity of my mind is more important to me than some short term dubious "fun" associated with alcohol. Secondly load balancers can be used to balance various sources distributed across the net. We could have our current mirror system used for that, of course all of the mirrors in the load balanced chain need to have the same directory structure. I know of large sites that do exactly that and use servers distributed around the world to distribute country specific load. They have a farm of reverser proxies and load balancers to create even load regardless of where you are. Maybe you are drunk, I am certainly not ever. A company like M$ does exactly that, granted on their own servers, but the same principle applies on servers that are not in the same data center.

...

The issue is that if the main rsync server get's hit hard no one can mirror. This needs to be adressed.

I DID address that, I guess.

...

A 1 CD installer as I did it solves issues also, since that is all most users need. Single addon packages can be installed seperately

Not enough; we need "more discipline" from the distributors.

You know, my problem is the actual situation and not a future dream.

...

...

All 10.0 betas were too large for my RAM, and even with the trick to redirect all http://download.opensuse.org/*i386*iso requests to ftp.gwdg.de for getting tight enough buffer cache hits so that

sure as I said I can sympathize and there is a short term solution: 1.) Have all mirrors rsync of a suse.com site. This site is not available to the general public and does only rsync 2.) Have servers rsync, make sure iso's are mirrored first and the inst-source after! 3.) Announce as soon as at least the iso's are available 4.) Allow the 1 cd install to be put on that system, or create an official one Medium term I would suggest to use Net technology for the purpose it has been invented for. Balance load. F5 BigIP is a good example of excellent working systems. those

...

...

isos never expired did not reach the 9.3 numbers.

the issue is that mirrors could not update from the main site in a reasonable time and that therefore everyone hit the main site. A dog that bites his own tail.

No, a SUSE dog that bites the GWDG tail.

...

...

Tomorrow 10 am is the next beta release time, but I bet none of

:D the

...

...

mirrors will be ready at that time...

Correct. That is the issue and not that 9.3 was the last Net distribution. What an absurd statement. The last .. yeah right!

Come on, boy, I see the behaviour of all the Linux distributors day over day. SUSE is still more "disciplined" than Debian (hazardous childs - 60 GB at once!) and MandrXXX, but IT IS ALREADY TOO MUCH, with a tendency to grow if they do not wake up.

In fact it is TOO LATE to not have bad issues. Maybe you understand this. If not, you will experience it.

No. The "hype" is far beyond 9.3 yet. But the situation is much more

worse.

DUE TO THE IDIOTIC DISTRIBUTION SIZE!

Crazy! Far too big! Who can stand that, tell me or shut down!

hmmm .. I do agree that distro's are large, but this is just the nature of the beast. It is like complaining that air is so damn breathable. Why could it not stop to be breathable for a few seconds ..... damit. ;) Given how we pollute it might actually happen .... 1 CD iso's are the way to go, but certainly only alleviate the issue, since with more people 1 iso is still going to kill your server unless the above steps are not done.

Totally without help, your whole statement. More worse than that: I feel misunderstood. Best would be I would panic my kernel and reboot not before

monday...

Well maybe you should not be drunk when writing such email and you would be better understood ;) Andreas

Utah countee? ;- ))

nope

Oh, i am very sorry; I did not realize that you have physical defects

which show you like drunken.

Flaming will not make you in any way smarter either.

...

...

...

The issue is that if the main rsync server get's hit hard no one can mirror. This needs to be adressed.

I DID address that, I guess.

...

A 1 CD installer as I did it solves issues also, since that is all most users need. Single addon packages can be installed seperately

Not enough; we need "more discipline" from the distributors.

You know, my problem is the actual situation and not a future dream.

sure as I said I can sympathize and there is a short term solution:

1.) Have all mirrors rsync of a suse.com site. This site is not available to the general public and does only rsync

Impossible tonight. AND tomorrow.

...

2.) Have servers rsync, make sure iso's are mirrored first and the inst- source after!

I do it like that currently, even more differentiated. But nuts, I won't get it in time.

OKay, smalltalk on... What a nice late summer night... I stamp you an idiot now until you prove the opposite to me.

...

1 CD iso's are the way to go, but certainly only alleviate the issue, since with more people 1 iso is still going to kill your server unless the above steps are not done.

With more people requesting a one- and- only- ISO. my server will laugh at all of them. Boy, I have served the whole world's full ISO i386 Beta3 set demands

WTF ???? the

last week, so I am sure I can stand a single- CD successor. But where is it?

We would need a "third party" to evaluate if I am right stating that "me drunken" is more earth- bound than you struggling to save the "lucidity of your mind". Not in sight, no interest at my side.

I doubt that Andreas

Am Donnerstag, 1. September 2005 04:47 schrieb Steven Lamb:

I have downloaded every beta version of open suse via bit torrent and I have found that my downloads from bit torrent are far slower than from ftp.gwdg.de so I end up downloading them from there because none of the mirrors have been updated. I have served out over 6gb from my home connection. I would prefer to simply have one iso to download and then install the packages on demand or to setup a Yast installation source and grab the latest updates from there. This would hopefully reduce the load on the servers because users would only be downloading updates / deltas to there currently installed rpms.

Hi Steve I always just downloaded CD 1 (as there is no minimal boot CD) and started the setup with the parameter "install=ftp://your.preferred.mirror/mirror/opensuse/SL-10.0-OSS-beta3/inst-source". Then you will get the net install where every single RPM you will install is downloaded, not the whole ISOs. Daniel PS ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/opensuse has always been very fast. It always delivered at 2 MBit/s which is actually the limit on my side. Perhaps we could balance the load manually and relieve gwdg.de.

SUSE-9.3 was the last acceptable "net distribution" - with an addon in size of 16 GB (sources were released earlier). That was already a huge struggle for the servers, but ftp.gwdg.de could stand to spill out more than 70 MByte/sec continuously for almost 4 days, due to the (huge, only ftp.kernel.org has more) 12 GB RAM. That was more than 4 TByte a day.

Well, I know one for sure that's at least as big.. www.ftp.be , aka ftp.belnet.be "The ftp-server resides on a quad-processor SunFire V440 with 16GB RAM and three StorEdge 3510 Arrays with more 4 TB of disk space for the FTP archives" It is always blazingly fast from every fast Belgian connection, and they mirror a huge amount of software. Perhaps they are a good possible openSUSE mirror? In the past they have always been very responsive in adding new mirrors, but now they have unfortunately not (yet) responded to my mail regarding openSUSE. Best, Lode

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 08:05:29AM +0200, houghi wrote:

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 01:33:52AM +0200, Eberhard Moenkeberg wrote:

...

So the best way would be not to release ISOs at all (exception: boot.iso), but to publish a script which can build each ISO by fetching the files from the inst-source tree.

I like the idea. I really do. It just somehow does not seem workable. Th e reason is that many people (also on this list) do not have a high speed connection at the place the instalation will be.

You don't need that for this idea. It does not make a difference which sort if internet connection you have whether you download one file of 1GB size or a script downloads 1000 files each of 1MB size.

Also you would have a CD or DVD burner in the machine that does the instalation.

You don't need that as well.

What I DO see is a script (mine adapted or a new one) that is on http://opensuse.org/index.php/1_CD_install and does the needed downloads.

This is exactly what Eberhard said. But I still think jigdo is better than a script because a script has so many dependencies to additional tools that it is quite error prone for the average user. jigdo could be used even by a novice user that is capable of burning iso images on every platform.

I am afraid most people will still want to be able to have everything, no matter if they use it or not. People are like that. They want to ahve, meaning feel or see them, so they know it is theirs.

Sure there are some of these people. But even then you don't have the packages duplicated on the FTP servers in the inst-source directory and the images.

Again, I like the idea. Just a bit afraid that ythe average person would think it to be strange/difficult.

I am sure it is not more difficult to explain jigdo to the average user than it is to explain how to burn ISO images. Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 08:43:23AM +0200, houghi wrote:

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 08:23:07AM +0200, Robert Schiele wrote: <snip>

...

You don't need that for this idea. It does not make a difference which sort if internet connection you have whether you download one file of 1GB size or a script downloads 1000 files each of 1MB size.

So what is the advatage of using this method? As example I do downloads at my job and my Linux is at home and only has dialup.

1. The mirrors do not have to handle so much data and thus it is more likely that the data you are requesting is already in the cache which reduces disk I/O on the server making the server faster. 2. If you want two different ISO sets that share an amount of files, you download these files only once because jigdo does cache them on your local system.

...

...

Also you would have a CD or DVD burner in the machine that does the instalation.

You don't need that as well.

Some might not, but how do I transform my Windows machine in a Linux machine if I do not have the data on an external whatever?

You don't have to. As I told multiple times there is a Windows client for jigdo.

I will test http://www.opensuse.org/index.php/Creating_Jigsaw_Download_Images_for_DVD_an... and let you know.

Very good. Currently the page mainly describes how to create the images and just refers to external pages when it comes to the user part of downloading the images. If the responsible people at SUSE agree to use this message for distribution we could add some more SUSE specific user description to this page. Or we make a separate page for the user download actions to not confuse them by all this image creation stuff they are not actually interested.

...

I am sure it is not more difficult to explain jigdo to the average user than it is to explain how to burn ISO images.

As I said, I will test it and see what happens. I will now put on my beginners hat and see what happens.

Have fun! Should I provide you with some of the sample images I made for beta3? Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 09:29:11AM +0200, houghi wrote:

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 09:03:38AM +0200, Robert Schiele wrote: Do far I am not going to comment, because I do not have it running. http://pi3.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/~schiele/suse/ does not offer me a workable solution. The other solutions ask me for a .jigdo file that I don't have and am not aware of.

See below.

...

Have fun! Should I provide you with some of the sample images I made for beta3?

That would be nice, but I first need to get to a .jigdo file.

You can find everything you need in http://pi3.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/~schiele/jigdotest/. You can either test with the i386 CD images for beta3 (the SUSE-10.0-CD-OSS-i386-Beta3* files) or with the network boot image (the boot.* files). The last one is better suited for a small test because it is much smaller. If we provided these images to a wider audience we should add even more mirror servers to allow load balancing but I think for this test the current jigdo file is ok.

This is my comparison till this moment. ftp winds handsdown: 1. Go to the download page 2. Download You have your iso's

For jigdo it is: 1. Go to the .jogdo download 2. Download jigdo

This could be provided from the download page then to ease the pain.

3. search for a .jigdo file

This would be provided on the download page then.

4. Run the program 5. ? Not sure if there is a step 5, as I did not get that far.

That should be all. You have an ISO image afterwards.

So what I am saying, although it might be a great tool, it will not be for everybody to use. I am by no means a guru or wizzard, but I am also not really a begeinner, so if I am stuck a lot of people will get stuck as well. With FTP I can say, click on http://example.com/cd1.iso and so on.

With jigdo I need to have them install another program.

Again, perhaps really great, but hardly : " not more difficult to explain jigdo to the average user than it is to explain how to burn ISO images "

Sure there are more "steps" and we need some _good_ documentation for the process but if we have that I still think that an average user can do it.

As I understand, jigdo will also only download (and make) the iso's, so that step has to be made for both.

Sure, but it releases the load we currently have on the mirror servers. In my opinion this is a reasonable value. Feel free to add your experiences to the wiki page and ask more questions. That way we could improve the documentation. It is likely that I don't see several problems because I just consider some things to be self-evident that other users don't consider to be. Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 10:48:39AM +0200, houghi wrote:

So tyhis is what I do. I mount my CD2.iso on /mnt. I then run jigdo-lite. It asks me for a .jigdo file and I eneter http://pi3.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/~schiele/jigdotest/boot.jigdo It looks at the differences.

Somehow I don't think that is the correct file for the differences for the one I want. It want to make a boot.iso and I want it to make a SUSE-10.0*.iso

You mean you want the 5 CD set? Well, in that case you need the appropriate jigdo file from the same directory. boot.jigdo is the one to create the network install image.

I still see the advatages (although it needs a LOT of streamlining) as an alternative to the delta downloads that are already out there. Or are there mofre differences between the two.

I _don't_ consider this as an alternative to the delta images but as an alternative to downloading full blown ISO images. The delta images should stay because they are are very good solution.

With differences I mean, are there things that the delta's do that jigdo doesn't?

The delta images produce deltas with deep knowledge of the RPM package format. jigdo does not have this knowledge. If you have old images I recommend to use the delta images but for users that don't have the old images jigdo can do the job.

One extra question, what about people who have used my script to make a DVD? They don't have the cd's against wich you compare.

There is a misunderstanding: jigdo does not compare to a specific old image but to a set of files. It does not matter on which media they are located. It just scans a local directory (if specified) for files already present and then downloads all missing ones. When it has got all needed files it assembles the final ISO image. Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 12:59:45PM +0200, houghi wrote:

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 12:41:28PM +0200, Robert Schiele wrote:

...

You mean you want the 5 CD set? Well, in that case you need the appropriate jigdo file from the same directory. boot.jigdo is the one to create the network install image.

Now I am confused. I thought jigdo would make some differences between an old version and a new version.

You could do such things with jigdo as well but as SUSE rebuilds all packages between the betas this is of no help.

...

I _don't_ consider this as an alternative to the delta images but as an alternative to downloading full blown ISO images. The delta images should stay because they are are very good solution.

Uhm. What will the impact for me as a user be? Why would I use this instead of the ISO's? Unless you can guarantee a simple click-click for the the end-user, they will want iso's

Are you now talking about delta images or about jigdo files?

If openSUSE would decide to drop the ISO's and go completely for jigdo, people will see this as unuserfriendly. As being userfriendly is one of the main goals, this should not be done.

I wouldn't consider it user-friendly if the mirror servers break down on every release. And I think if most users just download the whole ISO image when there are smarter solutions by just doing one step more but saving much bandwidth, then I think Eberhard is right in the first place: The full images should not be provided to force people learning new technology. I mean most people can operate spread-sheet applications nowadays although they are _ways_ more complicated because they have no option. If people don't learn because they have an option that is a little bit simpler but produce costs for the whole community then these people must be forced to learn. Let's see when Thomas has his simple Windows GUI implemented. I mean then there is no longer an argument. If people fail to copy _one_ URL into a simple Windows GUI, do you think they are capable of installing an operating system?

With that I see no advantage for the enduser to use it if I can just click on either a torrent or iso link. I see that mirrors would need less space, but users will not like to use it.

I see no advantage for me when you don't give me suitcase with 5 million Dollars. I see that you might not have so much money, but I will not like to see this. --- Got my point.

So from the mirrors point of view: good

...

From the users point of view: bad

Who are you making the distro for?

Who is providing support for distributing the stuff to the end user. If users are _that_ inflexible mirror admins could be as well. In my opinion someone that is not even willing to do some really simple steps to get the image should just go to a shop and buy an official package from SUSE. Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 03:16:52PM +0200, houghi wrote:

About the jigdo files. With iso files, I can just click and download. With *.jidgo you first need to install something and then hope it works. I was the best example of how it did NOT work.

This is why we need better end user documentation. This is not why we schould not use the tool at all.

The GUI was not available for me. The CLI needed some looking up on how to work this from my side.

With an iso, I just either click on it to download, or if I am a bit more

If you tell your browser to open all .jigdo files with jigdo-lite then just clicking the link should be enough as well (even without any GUI application).

advanced, I type wget. Will work and quaranteed no problems with whatever

what is the difference regarding complexity in typing $ wget http://some.server.org/some/path/and/file.iso to $ jigdo-lite http://some.server.org/some/path/and/file.jigdo ? Ok, the second line has some more letters.

For me that is no reason to do it in a more complicated way. To _ME_ this sounds as if you are saying: If you can not handle this, please go away. That is not my idea of userfriendly.

This sounds correct to you. If some person was not capable to open the door of his car I would _strictly_ recommend him _not_ to repair it himself. And BTW: Being user-friendly does not mean to fulfill every request a user has even if that request would hurt many other people in a community. Sometimes it is just necessary to say "no". You wouldn't jump from a bridge just because some tourist requests: "Could you please jump from this bridge, I'd like to take a really interesting photo." --- Maybe it is not friendly not to jump from the bridge to allow the tourist to take an interesting photo but saying "no" here could prevent you from hurting yourself.

...

I see no advantage for me when you don't give me suitcase with 5 million Dollars. I see that you might not have so much money, but I will not like to see this. --- Got my point.

OK. I will ask it the other way around. What are the advantage for me, as an enduser to use jidgo, instead of direct iso downloads?

If there are no ISOs availlable for direct download the advantage is that you get an ISO image that way. If you force them they will go that way. It's just like speed limits on the streets: Most people don't see an advantage in them but they help the community from being hurt by car accidents. Consider the mirror servers as being the streets and the users as being the car drivers.

...

Who is providing support for distributing the stuff to the end user. If users are _that_ inflexible mirror admins could be as well.

Users ARE that inflexible, as are a lot of admins. :-/

I don't think that Eberhard is inflexible and he told that there are problems with the current situation. Thus it seems quite fair when the users are willing to be a bit cooperative when this is necessary to find a solution. Otherwise it might happen that some mirror admins get angry and shut down their service. Then the situation becomes even more user-unfriendly.

...

In my opinion someone that is not even willing to do some really simple steps to get the image should just go to a shop and buy an official package from SUSE.

Again, to me that sounds eletish. Also: will openSUSe be available in the shops, or will that be SUSE?

Maybe this sounds eletish. In my opinion if someone just wants to consume something without even being a bit cooperative to those people providing the stuff then he should pay for it. If this sounds eletish then this is ok for me. Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de

jdd schrieb:

[...]

Jigdo is just an other mean to download a product, as bitorrent is. If there is somebody ready to set it up, why not?

jdd

I think also. if we could handle to problem of of the download-situation for the mirror(s) and could make that a little bit smaller - why not ? it will take a "short time" for the few of us to set these things up & running, but could be a "great" improvemend for the mirror(s) and maybee for the users. JBScout btw: I will be out of office for some time, and not working on the Windows GUI till the rest of this evening.

Robert & houghi, so if there is the need of a GUI on windows - I can handle that. I can create it here on a WinXP-system with Borland Delphi (sorry, no C#/mono :( ), but only in the time I have during my "normal" work. robert, could you explain me wath kind of info jigdo need to work correctly ( having in mind that at this point it will be a GUI for openSUSE, not a generell GUI for jigdo that it could be in the future ...), and some info about the data I can use to test it. houghi, do you have the time to test it ? and can it be a program that is compiled on WinXP (even it should run then without probs unter Win98 ... if it could handle large files ...). regards, JBScout

houghi schrieb:

I have no Win enviroment here. A while ago I threw out the only WIndows CD I had. Win95. For SUSE 9.2 and higher there already is a GUI. It would be nice if there would be a generic GUI, but that is more a Jigo issue then a SUSE issue.

oh, then I've mist something - I was remembering that I've read here in some post that you also have acceess to a Win-system. my fould :) but brave to threw them away ;) I have here in my office still 2 windows -systems running because we have a software running that need to.

testing on 9.1 and 10.x will be possible, but not during the wekend. I am going sailing.

my skills arend ready to build something on linux, but I think that will change in near future, because I will port that software from above to linux, so I would be able to work still at home without the need to have an VNC-connection to the office like right now. JBScout

houghi wrote:

The moment teh company wants me to have a Windows machine at home, they will have to give me one. :-)

I know some that already did :-( - and forgive linux (that is why knoppix is so good :-) jdd -- pour m'écrire, aller sur: http://www.dodin.net http://valerie.dodin.net http://arvamip.free.fr

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 11:42:29AM +0200, JBScout [Thomas Lodewick] wrote:

robert, could you explain me wath kind of info jigdo need to work correctly ( having in mind that at this point it will be a GUI for openSUSE, not a generell GUI for jigdo that it could be in the future ...), and some info about the data I can use to test it.

The only required information is the URL of gthe jigdo file. Optionally you could ask for a path to scan for local files but this is already an enhancement. That's all. With that information you can call the jigdo-lite binary. You can use http://pi3.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/~schiele/jigdotest/boot.jigdo for testing if you like. If you have further problems, questions, or comments feel free to contact me. Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 01:15:56PM +0200, JBScout [Thomas Lodewick] wrote:

did I see it correct - the only thing a windows-user needs (with the jigdo-lite binary of course) is the URL of the jigdo file ? hmm - and that needs u GUI ? that can be simple

It was not _me_ that claimed a GUI is required.

made with a batchfile. even there I can "ask" for something, and the user can insert it.

but ok. if it is as that simple, that GUI will be made fast I think. so fast that I wounder that it isn't out there allready made by someone.

I said in an earlier mail that it is just a stupid wrapper GUI.

is there a place where I can put the ready GUI and its source to ? or should I just send it out here to the list // your eMail ?

I could place it to my test directory if you like but why not upload to the Jigdo page to the Wiki? Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 02:02:32PM +0200, JBScout [Thomas Lodewick] wrote:

I would pref. the "save place" at your test directory, because at the wiki *everyone* could easy delete it and post a file fith virus or trojaner or anything else. not that I'm paranoit - just to be on a secure side.

"Just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you." ;-) No problem. Just send it to me by private mail. Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de

On Wednesday 31 August 2005 12:15, JBScout [Thomas Lodewick] wrote:

did I see it correct - the only thing a windows-user needs (with the jigdo-lite binary of course) is the URL of the jigdo file ? hmm - and that needs u GUI ? that can be simple

If we go down the route of doing something that will build the ISOs for the end user, (script/jigdo or whatever) then IMO one option we provide should be a java-applet to build the ISOs. So it's just a single click for the user to build the ISOs. No need to download a package/script, install it, then run it to dowload the ISOs. -- Simon Crute (posting personally) IS&T Bracknell Novell UK Ltd

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 02:45:20PM +0100, Simon Crute wrote:

If we go down the route of doing something that will build the ISOs for the end user, (script/jigdo or whatever) then IMO one option we provide should be a java-applet to build the ISOs. So it's just a single click for the user to build the ISOs. No need to download a package/script, install it, then run it to dowload the ISOs.

In principle this is a good idea but I see two problems: 1. Someone has to port the tool to Java. 2. AFAIK applets are not allowed to write to the disk without changing security settings. I really can't understand why it is a real problem to install one tool for the download. Some years ago when Windows did not include a ZIP compression utility million of Windows users managed without problems to install WinZIP or a similar tool to unzip ZIP files as you find them all over the net. Almost nobody complains why the included files are not stored uncompressed on the web servers. Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de

This is exactly what Eberhard said. But I still think jigdo is better than a script because a script has so many dependencies to additional tools

that it

is quite error prone for the average user. jigdo could be used even by a novice user that is capable of burning iso images on every platform.

I am afraid most people will still want to be able to have everything, no

...

matter if they use it or not. People are like that. They want to ahve, meaning feel or see them, so they know it is theirs.

Sure there are some of these people. But even then you don't have

jigdo is OK for me, but I think just as bad for the average user than a script. The same user group that can handle a script can handle jigdo ....... If you cannot handle a script, then you won't be able to handle jigdo either. The command line level is the same, I assume. the

packages duplicated on the FTP servers in the inst- source directory and the images.

...

Again, I like the idea. Just a bit afraid that ythe average person would think it to be strange/difficult.

I am sure it is not more difficult to explain jigdo to the average user than it is to explain how to burn ISO images.

I must admit I have not seen jigdo on windows, but I assume it is a command line of some sort? If it is I doubt what you say, just since I did work for an ISP helpdesk many years ago and the sort of user you get there is the one we will be getting with Linux's continued success. Such a user is seriously overloaded with the concept of a command line all together. Burning an iso is mainly a wizard driven thing today and is click click done ..... not so jigdo or a script. Both are just as complex. Those users are the ones that do not use bittorrent and will be hammering our servers. Correct me if I am making wrong assumptions in my conclusions. Andreas

Hi, On Wed, 31 Aug 2005, houghi wrote:

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 01:33:52AM +0200, Eberhard Moenkeberg wrote:

...

I guess you can't educate by telling, and not even by offering as we see. By publishing (not releasing the ISOs any other way) would result in a bad image for SUSE - "not user friendly".

So the best way would be not to release ISOs at all (exception: boot.iso), but to publish a script which can build each ISO by fetching the files from the inst-source tree.

I like the idea. I really do. It just somehow does not seem workable. Th e reason is that many people (also on this list) do not have a high speed connection at the place the instalation will be.

Also you would have a CD or DVD burner in the machine that does the instalation.

No. You could download a more or less tailored subset of inst-source and install from harddisk or over NFS/HTTP/FTP. Maybe a help of a script would be good for this which allows some selections.

What I DO see is a script (mine adapted or a new one) that is on http://opensuse.org/index.php/1_CD_install and does the needed downloads.

Yes.

I am afraid most people will still want to be able to have everything, no matter if they use it or not. People are like that. They want to ahve, meaning feel or see them, so they know it is theirs.

I guess the people who could feel rejected or neglected if there were no direct ISO downloads simply want to fetch "something solid" directly, so it is a matter of feeling.

Again, I like the idea. Just a bit afraid that ythe average person would think it to be strange/difficult.

A single-ISO-distribution could help. Cheers -e -- Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke@gwdg.de, em@kki.org)

Hi, On Wed, 31 Aug 2005, Andreas Girardet wrote:

...

I guess the people who could feel rejected or neglected if there were no direct ISO downloads simply want to fetch "something solid" directly, so it is a matter of feeling.

...

Again, I like the idea. Just a bit afraid that ythe average person would think it to be strange/difficult.

A single- ISO- distribution could help.

Eberhard

Now you are making sense ;) ..... there is always a solution and progress has never stopped since the invention of writing. Problem --> Solution --> More success. This is how it works. Humanity is resourceful ....

I can absolutely understand your frustration seeing that you actually can see daily how your servers get hit hard and suffer. I can totally sympathize and as you are painfully aware we must find a solution otherwise it could, yes be a huge issue and damage our reputation and effectiveness to deliver our goods from the onset.

I do not understand what you really mean, but I am shure: this thursday will be the blackest day ever. I tend to shutdown my servers to save me a quiet day. Just talk on this way, if you like to force me. Cheers -e -- Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke@gwdg.de, em@kki.org)

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 11:08:43AM +0100, Dave Chapman wrote:

On Wednesday 31 August 2005 00:33, Eberhard Moenkeberg wrote: snipped<

...

So the best way would be not to release ISOs at all (exception: boot.iso), but to publish a script which can build each ISO by fetching the files from the inst-source tree.

Cheers -e

Jigdo then?

I would still have the iso's available. People would want and expect them, even if they are not really needed. There are a lot of people out there whom I tell over and over again just to download the iso and they download the DVD for 9.3. -- houghi http://www.opensuse.org/index.php/Making_a_DVD_from_CDs

Hi Winston, would you please set your mail programm to a more common line length like maybe 73? It would greatly enhance the readability of your mails, at least the part which you've cited from other mails. Thanks, Jens