(forw) Would like to join mirror-list-d

Sun Nov 2 13:21:54 UTC 2008

On Sun, Nov 02, 2008 at 01:18:38AM -0400, Douglas Wade Needham wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I sent the below message to mirror-admin over a month ago, with
> absolutely no response.  At this point, I now have two questions and
> some comments, which would be probably be a good fit to discuss on
> that mailing list, but which I will also address to the web team.

Sorry, sometimes these requests fall through the cracks.  Thanks for
sending again.

>    Now, from what I have figured out, there is no way to have the
>    entry automatically change the site-local netblock for the address
>    of this server.

Correct.  I had at one point considered letting report_mirror do so,
but no one had needed that feature (until now), so it hasn't been
written.

I don't (currently) allow DNS names to be used as a netblock list
entry, because that would introduce more complications (they'd get
checked once an hour when the cache refreshes, so there's some delay
which is then dependent on the TTL of your DDNS entries; round-robin
DNS would completely fail too).  I'm open to adding this too if these
can be overcome.

>    If this were possible, mearly adding a proxy
>    statetment to yum.conf to point through this server could result in
>    automatic redirecttion to the mirrors on this server.  It seems to
>    me that by perhaps putting a site-local netblock with an address of
>    0.0.0.0/32 and having the combination of mirrormanager and
>    report_mirror update this would be quite easy to do.
>
>    So, my question is whether this is doable already, and if so, how?

It wouldn't be that hard to add.  In report_mirror, parse_host(), add
'netblocks' to optional_options.  In mirrormanager/model.pl
Host::_uploaded_config(), add code to check for presence of this
option and update its list accordingly.

> 2) Related to #1, I have noticed that when I have had to delete the
>    old address and add a new site-local netblock (since there is no
>    way to edit existing netblocks), it can take 90 mins or perhaps
>    longer to have the mirrorlist update to include my mirror.  Can
>    someone tell me why this might be?

yeah, it's kind of klunky in that regard.  however, the delay would
happen regardless.  yum and friends see a cache, generated at the top
of each hour, of the information in the database.  We're dealing with
too many requests/second to be able to have each be a full database
lookup.

> 
> Now, for some additional comments.
> 
> a) In the documentation found in
> 
> 	http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Mirroring
> 
>    the `yum install mirrormanager-client` will not find the package,
>    as it does not appear to be in the default repositories.

It's relatively newly packaged (posted 10/14), so it's in rawhide and
updates-testing for Fedora 9 and EL-5 right now.

On fedora 9:
# yum --enablerepo=updates-testing-newkey install mirrormanager-client

>    In addition, the git tree link would be much better off if it
>    instead gave the instructions for using git to retrieve the
>    latest version.  As it is, one must make a guess as to what the
>    actual git repository path for mirrormanager is.

Good idea.  I updated the wiki now.

> b) There needs to be better linkage to the above page to make it more
>    findable.

Which page?  wiki/Infrastructure/Mirroring?  Where else would you like
to see it linked?  It's linked on the top page of
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org which is what many users would see.

> c) As mentioned, there really needs to be a way to edit data such as
>    the site-local netblocks associated with a host.

fair enough.  There hasn't been a need for it in the past, at least
expressed to me.

> d) Is there any better documentation available for report_mirror?
>    Even cobbler, which is undergoing substantial development, has
>    better documentation from what I have found, and I am hoping that I
>    have just failed to find the documentation.

I agree there should be more documentation.

> I am hoping to get things working to the point where I can convince
> people where I work to allow me to setup a mirror and use FC and
> clobbler for our supercomputing cluster at work instead of our current
> of using debian and some kludgy tools.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> - Doug   
> 
> ----- Forwarded message from Douglas Wade Needham <cinnion at ka8zrt.com> -----
> 
> From: Douglas Wade Needham <cinnion at ka8zrt.com>
> To: mirror-admin at fedoraproject.org
> Subject: Would like to join mirror-list-d
> Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:21:58 -0400
> Reply-To: cinnion at ka8zrt.com
> Message-ID: <20080920172158.GB3950 at pell.home.ka8zrt.com>
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I would like to join at least the mirror-list-d list, as I have been
> using two private mirrors for installs (at work and at the
> university), and want to move towards using the same mirror for
> updates without having to hack the repo files.  As such, I have been
> going through the Mirroring article, but am finding some areas which
> need further discussion and documenting.
> 
> BTW... If you are going to add my account to the mailing list rather
> than just send me a 'go ahead...we will approve it', then please use
> the email address of 'fedoraproject at ka8zrt.com'.

You can subscribe yourself to the mailing lists at
http://redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/mirror-list (announcements - low volume) and 
http://redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/mirror-list-d (discussion)

and you'll be approved onto them.  You've already set up your host in
MirrorManager and found report_mirror, so, if we can get you past the
DHCP challenge, you'll be good to go.

We're in Infrastructure change freeze this week, pending the
F10-Preview release, so even if I had the code written for
report_mirror, I couldn't put it into production for several days.

Thanks,
Matt
Fedora Mirror Wrangler    

-- 
Matt Domsch
Linux Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO
linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux