Hi, (Cc'ing the mirrorbrain discuss list, because the issue could be of general interest) On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 10:40:22 +0200, Stephan Kulow wrote:

Am Donnerstag 09 Juli 2009 schrieb EGD:

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Site http://mirrors.opensuse.org/list/all.html Russia for some reason is in "Asia." This is a mistake.

It's not a mistake - although it can of course be debated.

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see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia "...is a country in northern Eurasia (Europe and Asia together)..."

wikipedia is a wiki, everyone can edit it to its liking. And the Eurasia fact is linked as quoted from http://www.britannica.com, which reads:

Russia = Country, eastern Europe and northern Asia, formerly the preeminent republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Taking that Eurasia is not a continent, I think it's pretty fair to pick one out of Europe and Asia. I would like to refer to this site before we repeat the discussion: http://gabbahead.newsvine.com/_news/2006/08/31/346545-russia-europe-or-asia

Good link :-)

I guess the simplest solution to this problem is stopping splitting countries by continents on that page.

Greetings, Stephan

The mirror list you are looking at is auto-generated from the MirrorBrain database. As such, it reflects a mapping used internally. In this case, it reflects the fact that MirrorBrain uses maxmind.com's GeoIP database to resolve client IP addresses to country codes. The country codes used by GeoIP are defined in ISO-3166-1 (see http://www.iso.org/iso/iso-3166-1_decoding_table); however, an association of countries to regions/continents is not defined in a standard (to my knowledge). MaxMind adds a mapping for this internally, and they happened to associate Russia to the continent Asia: http://www.maxmind.com/app/iso3166 (follow link to http://www.maxmind.com/ap_country_list.txt vs. http://www.maxmind.com/eu_country_list.txt) (This is not to confuse with "EU" or "AP" used by GeoIP sometimes in the country (sic!) field, in few particular cases, as pointed out in http://www.maxmind.com/app/faq#EUAPcodes) I think that it is fair that they did this - as somebody has pointed out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_continent#cite_note-5 the country could be seen in Asia, by surface, and in Europe, by population. Depending on where you look, you'll see different associations. The United Nations Statistics Division lists Russia in (Eastern) Europe: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm http://www.geonames.org uses Europe, too. Anyway, in a classification like this, a country cannot be part of _two_ continents, however large it is. Now, MirrorBrain's mirror selection is governed to a large extent by GeoIP. GeoIP is not the only criterion, though. Sending Russian clients to (other) Asian mirrors is known to not work very well. This is a problem that we ran into in the past. Connectivity from Russia to e.g. China or Japan isn't as good as connectivity to central Europe. Therefore, openSUSE's MirrorBrain is set up to send Russian clients to European mirrors (provided that no Russian mirror is known for the requested content). The mirror overview list can't always reflect the mirror selection that happens behind the scene, and can present only a simplified view. The same is true for Turkey, Kazakhstan and Georgia by the way. Ukraine is treated as EU by GeoIP, though. In practice, this should not cause problems, due to the exceptions that we have in place for this. It would be interesting to know where more such exceptions are needed, and where we are not aware about them yet. Feedback would be welcome. Thanks, Peter -- "WARNING: This bug is visible to non-employees. Please be respectful!" SUSE LINUX Products GmbH Research & Development

On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 05:40:58 +0200, Andreas Marschke wrote:

How about deciding whee the most of the servers for this part of the planet are located and then decide if its asia and or europe. And just as a kind

The geographical location of the servers in relation to the users location is one thing, but the connectivity (bandwidth and quality of connection) often differs remarkably. We often find that neighbouring countries have little connectivity between each other, while both of them might have decent connectivity (only) to central Europe (mostly Germany) and the US.

suggestion on the out come it might be possible that our fellow hackers from India may do also dfepend on these particular servers and by that the mirrors are allowed to be in ASIA

I'd like to know details, but my expectation would be that Indian users can not be served well by Russian mirrors; it would be quite surprising to me. But it would be valuable to hear about first-hand experience from India (and other countries). It might be interesting to use YaST/zypper as a vehicle for acquiring this kind of information on an automatic basis. We could acquire and collect quite some knowledge! If somebody would like to work on this, let me know. Peter -- "WARNING: This bug is visible to non-employees. Please be respectful!" SUSE LINUX Products GmbH Research & Development

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 07:41:53 +0530, A S Alam wrote:

On ਸ਼ੁੱਕਰਵਾਰ 10 ਜੁਲਾਈ 2009 05:10 ਸ਼ਾਮ, Peter Poeml wrote:

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On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 05:40:58 +0200, Andreas Marschke wrote:

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suggestion on the out come it might be possible that our fellow hackers from India may do also dfepend on these particular servers and by that the mirrors are allowed to be in ASIA

I'd like to know details, but my expectation would be that Indian users can not be served well by Russian mirrors; it would be quite surprising to me. But it would be valuable to hear about first-hand experience from India (and other countries).

I am from India, most of time, default got Japan server to get update, which is very slow, so I 'always' manually change to US or Germany (with new release of OS).

I am not hacker, but user/translator

The best would of course be to find a mirror in India. Maybe you know some organizations that you could talk to and suggest that they set up a mirror? Failing that, we can give Indian users a similar treatment as others - sending them to German or US mirrors. That would save you a manual override. I have configured that now. If we add an Indian mirror later, it'll automatically be preferred. The mirrors I chose are: Germany: ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de ftp.uni-bremen.de ftp.uni-heidelberg.de US: rackspace.com mirror.fastsoft.net If you see some of them working not well for you, you could let me know and we could refind later. Thanks for the feedback! Peter -- "WARNING: This bug is visible to non-employees. Please be respectful!" SUSE LINUX Products GmbH Research & Development