[Mageia-discuss] Switzerland Mirror Switch.ch

[Juergen Harms]

There is some history about this issue, worth knowing.

For many years, Switch had hosted a Mandriva mirror. Sometime, about a 
year ago, that mirror disappeared. I had then contacted Switch to find 
out what had happened (that was before the time of Mageia).

The reply was that the usage of the Mandriva mirror had dropped to such 
a low level, that Switch had decided to remove the mirror - the list of 
software mirrored at Switch is quite remarkable, but without some 
housekeeping the amount of mirrored data gets out of control. I had this 
discussion with
Thomas Lenggenhager <thomas.lenggenhager at switch.ch>
(Thomas is the head of the group responsible for the mirror).

Later, when Mageia had started to prepare its release, I had a 
discussion with Christoph Graf - the vice-director for Network services 
- and asked him about the policy of Switch with regards to adding a 
mirror for a new Linux distribution - which, necessarily, starts from a 
close-to-0 usage level. We agreed that Switch feels it its mission to 
give new distributions a chance. At that time we did not press the 
discussion further, waiting for the first Mageia (pre-)release to become 
available.

I agree with you that Switch is an ideal mirror for hosting a Mageia 
mirror, I suggest you send the information pointed to by Michael to (but 
only when information relative to item (5) of the howto exists - if 
switch does not have the information how to register, chances are big 
that the request ends up in some todo-sometime-later list)

netservices at switch.ch

I have read the howto at
http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Mageia/mirror.readme
I have corrected some typos (it is a short document, I append the 
corrected text to this mail). Regarding the objective contents, I have 3 
comments

(1) is a 2-hour interval for syncing not exagerated? I think to remember 
that with Mandriva there was one sync during the night; a longer period 
reduces the load on the server, and reduces the periods during which 
inconsistencies might be possible; probably a distinction between 
cauldron (tier-1) and production (tier-2) requirements should be made 
(coming back to Switch: Switch did not host cooker).

(2) is it wise - at the tier-2 level - to suppress checksum protection? 
I would say that with the relatively low number of tier-2 servers the 
additional load on the server should not be prohibitive (particularly if 
the interval of syncs is made longer). Mistakes due to transmision 
errors at this level have a high multiplication rate and a substantial 
nuissance potential - and certainly do not help to improve the image of 
the distribution. Again, there is a difference in what is tolerable in a 
development and in a production environment.

(3) should the form not also specify the email and telephone number of a 
contact person to be contacted in case of problems?

Juergen

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This document describes the way to implement a Mageia Mirror.

1) Prerequisite

The expected size of the mirror is around 700GB.

You need rsync software to synchronise the tree.

2) Official source

For public mirrors, we encourage you to use our Tier-1 mirror.

This servers synchronises the tree directly from the Mageia rsync server

     o rsync://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/mageia/
       located in Paris (France)

3) Rsync options

Ensure you're using at least these options:

     -a -H

We appreciate if, in addition, you also add the options:

    --delete-after -S

Don't use the compression and checksum options, they create excessive
load on the remote server

4) Automated update procedure

The tree must be synchronized at least every 2 hours.

Please ensure that another rsync process is not started while a first
one is still running. Use a lock file.

5) Registering your mirror

To be done