Instant Mirror Status...?

[James Antill]

On Fri, 2008-09-26 at 01:35 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> > On Sep 23, 2008, Matt Domsch <Matt_Domsch at dell.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> Furthermore, I absolutely don't want to return the same mirror at the
> >> top of the list _for everyone_ in a given country.
> > 
> > Hash MM's "primary" IP address to select one of the various available
> > mirrors, assuming they're returned in a consistent order?
> 
> If you are going to return a list of N mirrors, make N copies of that 
> list, rotating one position for each.  Knock the last octet off the 
> source IP and hash the remaining part with some consistent algorithm 
> that will give you N values and use that to choose the copy of the list 
> you send.

 Which is much harder than it sounds given that MM can't actually "make
N copies" of each list of IPs it might send out. But...

>   Everything is as distributed and robust as before, but you 
> don't defeat attempts to save your bandwidth with caching proxies.

 This is _only_ true if you are getting asked for the list from every
single IP address, or that the subset of IP addresses you are getting
asked from happen to be as random/distributed as what MM does now.
 You might argue that it'll probably "random/distributed enough", but I
find it much easier to believe that the above will solve your problem
and you didn't get much further than that in your analysis.

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora