InstantMirror Project: Google Summer of Code 2009

[Warren Togami]

Kulbir Saini wrote:
> 
>     It was _not_ misguided. It was designed for the people who can't 
> afford replication of complete mirror because they pay a fortune for the 
> bandwidth they use. It forced squid to cache only the packages which are 
> used in an intelligent fashion. So that saves a lot of bandwidth which 
> is otherwise wasted by other softwares to keep packages upto date which 
> are never used within an organization (due to community interest).
> 
>     IntelligentMirror also solved the problem of "squid doesn't serve a 
> package XYZ from cache when it is fetched from a different mirror." 
> which no other plugin/software, I know, solves till date.

I really don't mean to belabor this tired topic any further, but you are 
wrong.

Squid can do this without a plugin with only a few squid.conf options 
that avoid the corner-case mismatch errors when files change content 
without changing filenames, as is common with repodata or when RPMS are 
re-signed.

squid.conf options:
refresh_pattern repodata/.*$    0       0%      0
refresh_pattern images/.*$    0 0%      0
refresh_pattern .*rpm$    0     0%      0

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager
Then you add a Site-Local net range to MirrorManager so yum clients on 
your network will automatically prefer a particular mirror.  This is 
either a reverse squid proxy cache running on your own network, or a 
particular public mirror URL + transparent squid proxy.  Either will 
work just fine with the above 3 lines of squid.conf.  This is especially 
a good idea because you do not need to modify any configurations on 
individual clients.  If you have a Fedora laptop on this network, it 
will use the cached mirror.  If you move your laptop to another network, 
MirrorManager will tell it where to find a different mirror.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com