Instant Mirror Status...?

[Les Mikesell]

James Antill wrote:
>
>>>> How would it know?
>>> And more importantly, if you want to always hit the same mirror, why don't
>>> you edit its configuration to reflect that ?
>> Here's the scenario: you have hundreds/thousands of people behind a 
>> caching proxy.  They don't know each other, they don't know what OS 
>> distribution someone else is installing and the ones that happen to be 
>> installing Fedora aren't going to know what mirror someone else chose or 
>> got by accident.  Likewise for the proxy - it's not going to know/care 
>> that there are a bunch of different mirrors for different stuff that an 
>> assortment of people might or might not want at the same time.
> 
>  Outcomes:
> 
> 1) Noone does anything and the ISP/company serving the people download
> packages/etc. lots of times eating the company/ISPs bandwidth.
> 
> 2) ISP/company tells MirrorManager what is going on, and saves bandwidth
> (note they get to solve their own problem, yay).

That will probably happen in about a dozen cases.

>  And here's another scenario: hundreds/thousands of people with "close"
> IPs which aren't behind the same proxy, MirrorManager gives them the
> same list in the same order to try and hack around #1 above.

Huh?  Why do you think this ratio would be skewed worse with intelligent 
processing than randomly?   And if you have a reason to think that, why 
can't you use a heuristic to compute the distribution fairly?

> Now
> everyone's download goes slow as they all hit the same mirror server
> (and the mirror server admin wonders why he got screwed over).

Well, no - even if some of the sites in an unfair distribution don't 
have proxies, many will and those will reduce the load on the mirrors.

> Everyone
> complains and says MirrorManager/yum sucks ... and there's nothing
> anyone can do to fix the problem.

That would only happen if your intelligent computation is worse than 
random.  And if it is a problem you could go back to the old way without 
making anything worse than it is now - or use a more intelligent 
heuristic if you see your first attempt is wrong.  You can't get worse 
than the cache pollution that happens when every attempt for the same 
file gets a different URL.  It doesn't have to be perfect or locked 
forever to make it better.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com