Finding the "best" mirror

[seth vidal]

> hmmm measuring during the times the net is quiet sounds evil... also
> loading a bunch of mirrors all the time just to measure bw sounds like
> it won't scale well with the number of people doing it.
> 
> I wonder if yum could do a reverse dns lookup, and then do a
> right-to-left matching trick on the name vs the mirrors (perhaps
> excepting .com/.net/.org); that way for me, I get at least mirrors in
> .nl, and if my ISP's mirror gets into the mirror list, I'll always get
> that one. 
> 
> Well maybe it needs a few tricks, like traceroute to somewhere with a
> TTL of 4, and use some of the intermediate machines for the matching as
> well (and have the same info available for each mirror) so that you stay
> within the same upstream bandwidth provider etc etc

The above is why I suggested doing this in a secondary script and not in
yum. It would be a mess to put that code _in_ yum. But if someone wanted
to write a generic mirror tester then lots of things could use it.

-sv