[Mageia-discuss] Switzerland Mirror Switch.ch

[Michael Scherer]

Le jeudi 17 février 2011 à 11:57 +0100, Juergen Harms a écrit :
> 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

Thanks, I have updated it. ( and will need to add other corrections )

> (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).

I think the instruction for now are only for cauldron, since that's the
only thing we have so far. But yes, maybe for stable release, this
should be changed.

> (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.

Well, in fact, given the way tcp work, I do not see how it could suffer
from a transmission problem. I mean there is checksum, we are not using
udp to transmit anything ?

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

A email for sure. A phone number is less useful ( ie, you need to speak
english, to call on long distance ). That's just a mirror, after all. 

For tier1, that's a different story of course.

-- 
Michael Scherer