Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-buildservice (284 mails)

[Marcus Rueckert <mrueckert@xxxxxxx>]

On 2007-10-09 02:10:10 +0100, Benji Weber wrote:
> The redirector is causing problems again. Now with installation for many users.
> 
> Some of the mirrors are broken or under heavy load, but the redirector
> is still redirecting people to those mirrors. This coupled with the
> fact that the openSUSE installer now selects "use online repositories"
> by default (a good thing) means that many people are experiencing
> failed installations.
> 
> The real problem is the mirror "sticky" that means people always get
> the same mirror. This means that if the user gets a bad mirror and a
> package download timeout then the installation has essentially failed.
> If the user clicks retry he/she will get the same mirror, and a
> timeout again, and again. There is approximately 1minute timeout
> between attempts, and several hundred packages to install from online
> sources by default. This means even if the user clicks "skip" for each
> package it will take hours to complete the install. So the install has
> effectively failed because of the redirector's mirror sticky.
> 
> Quite a number of users have commented on this behaviour, I have
> experienced it myself with 2 installs already. It has also been
> mentioned in some reviews, contributing to overall bad reviews of
> 10.3.
> 
> Other distribution's solutions:
> 
> 1: Round Robin DNS
> + No problem with redirector server going down
> + If one of the mirrors in rotation is broken clicking "retry" will
> likely select a good mirror.
> + Location based mirror selection not possible but can have e.g.
> eu.download.opensuse.org, us.download.opensuse.org ... etc
> 
> - Frequently changing repositories such as on the build service, could
> bounce between new metadata & old packages and vice versa.
> 
> 2: Mirror list files
> 
> Other distributions use mirror-list-files which the package manager interprets.
> 
> + No sticking-to-bad-mirror problem of the redirector.
> + Avoids the bouncing between mirrors problem of RR DNS.
> 
> - The server with the mirror list on needs to be up when it is requested.
> - Cannot be achieved without modifying the client package management software.
> 
> 
> Sticky breaks installations, no sticky breaks general package
> management - what is the solution? Can the redirector do better
> checking on mirror availability and status? any thoughts? A solution
> that can be achieved by only modifying d.o.o so that future 10.3
> installations can go smoothly is obviously preferable.

just a few first thoughts. i will think more about it:

1. the frequency for those checks would be too high to avoid the
problem.

2. my first approach would be some history in the redirector.
   if a client retries we know that the client requested the same file
   again and send it to a different mirror.

   the information could be stored in the same session structure as the
   sticky mirror.

    darix

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