On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 07:56:22AM +0100, Benji Weber wrote:
On 06/06/07, Michael E Brown
wrote: Several reasons. - In the current yum implementation, the client gets the mirror list and randomly chooses an entry from the list. - It also will fail over down the list if there is any connection problem with the first server. - The mirror list can list different servers that have the repo at their own path. - Some people dont have administrative access to the web server to change the web server configuration to redirect.
The mirror list is simply a URL to a file containing a list of mirror paths. Because it is a URL, it can easily be configured to point at a cgi that outputs the list.
The redirector used on software.opensuse.org and download.opensuse.org does solve most of the same problems. See http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service/Redirector
If the user adds the repository from software.opensuse.org or download.opensuse.org each request will be redirected to the appropriate location on a mirror. It should only redirect to mirrors which are actually working.
The main problem with this approach is that the central redirector must always be up, especially if one is encouraging users to use the redirector rather than mirrors directly. Currently (d|o).opensuse.org is not very reliable, going down every few weeks. Currently every time it goes down a large chunk of users lose package management. Until it is at least co-hosted in Provo as well as Nuremberg I'm not sure it's a good idea to use for the automatically added repositories.
Currently most of the mirrors the redirector redirects to (heanet, belnet, switch etc) are far more reliable than the redirector itself.
Thanks for the pointer. The yum mirrorlist functionality is useful because you can point to a file:// url if you want. For my purposes, I am not doing that, but others do. So I prototyped an extremely dumb example to make sure that my webservers support setting http status from within cgi scripts, and it appears to work. I am going to say I still prefer the mirrorlist functionality, though. It returns a larger list of addresses to the client, and the client can fail over to another server if there is a problem. This makes for much more reliable downloads. -- Michael -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: zypp-devel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: zypp-devel+help@opensuse.org