https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=369531 Summary: Mirror support in libzypp Product: openSUSE 11.0 Version: Alpha 2plus Platform: All OS/Version: openSUSE 11.0 Status: NEW Severity: Major Priority: P5 - None Component: libzypp AssignedTo: zypp-maintainers@forge.provo.novell.com ReportedBy: guru@unixtech.be QAContact: dmacvicar@novell.com Found By: --- Currently and unlike e.g. yum or smart, libzypp/yast2/zypper doesn't have support for a client-side list of mirrors. This is an issue during redirector (download.opensuse.org) downtime for several reasons: - people not able to install security patches - people not able to install openSUSE (network install) Experienced users can reconfigure the list of repository sources to use mirrors, but that isn't an option to less experienced users as they don't know where nor how to work around the issue. Client-side failover would greatly address the somewhat frequent downtime issues with the redirector as it could fall back on other servers. Another advantage would be a much more robust handling of various error scenarios that can occur when a file cannot be downloaded from a mirror as expected. One scenario is e.g. ftp5.gwdg.de is not being available for 5 minutes, because a router is being rebooted there (which actually happened today). What happens now is that after 1 to 3 minutes the redirection to that mirror is disabled by the redirector, since its probing notices it. But in the time window before disabling, many libzypp clients are sent to that server and get timeouts. With client-side mirror support, zypper and yast2 would try to fetch from the next mirror and succeed, without any user intervention (nor required expertise). Nevertheless, the mirror list should be dynamic instead of static (as it was implemented before the redirector) as that list changes frequently do to the ever changing content (security patches and especially Build Service repositories). A pretty precise approach is even documented on the wiki (http://en.opensuse.org/Libzypp/Failover), and other established, solid and widely tested implementations can be looked at for inspiration (smart, yum). While this sounds like an enhancement request, it is a much more critical point than one would think, as it regularly prevents people from updating with patches or even installing openSUSE in the first place. The following presentation given at FOSDEM by Peter Poeml gives some background: http://www.poeml.de/~poeml/talks/redirector/ References: - http://en.opensuse.org/Libzypp/Failover - http://lists.opensuse.org/zypp-devel/2007-06/msg00022.html - http://lists.opensuse.org/zypp-devel/2007-06/msg00006.html - http://www.poeml.de/~poeml/talks/redirector/ -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.