From owner-freebsd-hubs Mon Jan 22 17:21:36 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hubs@freebsd.org Received: from basm.cerias.purdue.edu (basm.cerias.purdue.edu [128.10.243.21]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 95F3E37B401 for ; Mon, 22 Jan 2001 17:21:18 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (raj@localhost) by basm.cerias.purdue.edu (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.3) with ESMTP id UAA06769 for ; Mon, 22 Jan 2001 20:21:17 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 20:21:17 -0500 (EST) From: Brian Poole To: Subject: Re: using loopback mounts... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hubs@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, jason andrade wrote: G'day Jason, > i disagree with the `drives as cheap' bit, only because our Dell fibrechannel > arrays are definitely not as cheap as i'd like. but you get what you pay > for.. Drives are extraordinarily cheap, even for the high quality ones, compared to skilled labor (which I assume you consider yourself ;). > as a mirror librarian (ook!) with a bunch of different archives, i can say > that most distros now have multiple cdrom images. it's becoming increasingly > hard to use loopback mounts on a permanent basis. for what it's worth, i > try and use loopbacks to `seed' the archive releases we use, where possible > (when your traffic costs $100 per gig, incoming, if it takes me 30 minutes > of my time to re-use a loopback.. well, i certainly don't get paid $200/hour :-) Hmm, this doesn't make sense. Your traffic costs 100$/gig, but you aren't affecting your traffic by mounting the ISOs as loopback. All you are affecting is the usage of disk drives, by saving 650 odd MB per ISO because you don't need have duplicate files. When you have to do this repeatedly (say for 4-5 OSes you may mirror, times say 2 images per OS) however many times the OSes are releasing new versions it adds up to a fair chunk of time, even if you are practiced at it, and it only takes a few minutes for each new release. In contrast, simply buying a new HD, while this may have a higher initial cost, does not need to be re-bought all of the time because as new releases are released older versions are moved to archive sections (generally, FreeBSD seems to have an unusually high number of old releases in the main directory, if I must say so myself, up to ~50G now, aren't we? ;) > i suspect loopback stuff will be used a lot more once DVD-R images start to > be released.. to date, i only know of SuSE Linux offering this. i was Perhaps so, it would certainly make it more sensible in my opinion, as I'd be saving more HD space. However, I don't know how popular DVD images will be in the near future, even on cable|DSL ISOs still take quite a while to download, larger images would make this even slower. As well the number of DVD-Rs in public use is rather low I imagine. And please, don't CC: me ;) I promise, I am on the list. -b To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hubs" in the body of the message