Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2002 16:06:50 -0400 From: "James B. Wilkinson" <jimmy@CS.cofc.EDU> To: freebsd-hubs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: limited local mirror Message-ID: <a05100303b97329ae0b4f@[153.9.17.27]> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0208031752280.1105-100000@spam.averse.net> References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0208031752280.1105-100000@spam.averse.net>
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>On Sat, 3 Aug 2002, Oliver Fromme wrote: > >> James B. Wilkinson wrote: >> > I'm using FreeBSD in a lab in a building that has slow Internet >> > access, so I'm interested in putting a mirror for just the ports >> > collection in the lab room. The only information I found at the >> > website that looked germane was about putting up a full mirror using >> > CVSup. I was sort of hoping to use ftp and not have to learn yet >> > another bit of sysadmin business this summer. I don't even need the >> > entire ports collection, but I need ethereal for sure, and that has >> > about a dozen dependencies, and I don't know how many more ports >> > *they* will pull in. It could expand to quite a tree. Right now I see >> > two problems: getting all those files and putting them where they >> > need to be without having to type thousands of command lines, and >> > getting my local server onto the list of places where the other >> > machines will look for the sources (preferably at the head of the >> > list). > >Do you want to mirror the ports distfiles (ie from the ftp archive), or >do you want to mirror the ports tree (ie, /usr/ports). As Oliver says, >the latter is very efficiently mirrored with cvsup. I think I should back up and fill in some background. My fault; sorry. I'm teaching a course in networking this fall. What we are going to do is use the three-volume Stevens set for a text. Those books describe a lot of experiments he did with a small dedicated network, tcpdump, and a few other programs. The idea is to get some network exchange started, watch the frames go by with tcpdump, and then make inferences about the way the network code works. Tcpdump is no problem since its part of the standard installation. After talking to some others, I decided that ethereal would also be a useful thing to have, and I'll have to build it from a port. I did that as a test the other day, and it went smoothly but took some time, maybe half an hour or a bit more including all the prerequisites that got pulled in. I didn't stay in the room and watch. I've been given ten Dells to equip the lab, and they are in a room that is connected to our main building with 11Mbps Aironet access points. (At the time of my original posting I thought the Aironets were only 250kbps. Now it turns out that our Internet connection, not the Aironet link, is the bottleneck.) I want the class members to do the install during the first class meeting, putting FreeBSD on all ten machines. This isn't a sysadmin class, so I want the install to go pretty rapidly and not involve much more than simply following instructions. I've got another machine in the room for them to ftp some files from to make this easier: rc.conf, XF86Config, .xinitrc, and a kernel config file for remaking kernels. I've also put a copy of ports.tar.gz there, so getting them the ports tree is no problem. One way to proceed from there would be to simply hook all the machines up to the Internet and let them all do "make" in the /usr/ports/net/ethereal directory (or whatever the path actually is). I worried about what would happen when all ten installs got to that point at about the same time when the class members were doing this for real. So I got the idea of putting the distfiles on the server that's already in the room and letting them fetch the files from there. That's what my original question was: how to put up the distfiles on my server, and how to get the other machines to look there instead of at ftp.freebsd.org (or wherever). Now it has just occurred to me while writing all this that it's possible that most of the time I waited between typing "make" and having ethereal made (I should have written it down, but I didn't.) was spent compiling and linking and that very little of it was spent actually using the network connection. If that is the case, then I don't have a problem at all since all that stuff will go on in parallel on the different machines. On the other hand, it may well be that a large part of the wait time *was* using the network, and that would not go on in parallel in a mass install of ten machines at once. That was the reason that I wanted to serve the distfiles out from the local server. If it turns out that there *is* a lot of time spent using the network connection while making ethereal, I thought that during class was not a good time to find it out. And I really have no idea about the load doing all this at once would put on ftp.freebsd.org. Since the class isn't really about sysadmin, I wanted to keep the install as simple as possible, and that seemed to mean that I wanted to stay away from cvsup. ftp comes as part of the standard installation package, so using it doesn't require any extra steps. Somebody mentioned NFS, and that's also part of the standard install. The problem I have with NFS is that these machines are going to get hooked up in all kinds of small network combinations, and I don't think I want to always have to have an NFS server available for each machine all the time. I'm afraid it would get in the way of some of the experimental setups. I'd prefer each machine to be able to run everything it has from its own disk. Oh, I almost forgot. Once the install is done, I'm not much concerned about updates. Security is not an issue since the wire to the Internet will almost never be plugged in to any of these machines. This is not a problem of keeping everything up to date. It's a problem of getting all those files served out to my ten machines in a short amount of time during the initial install. Thanks for the help. You guys are one of the big reasons I decided to use FreeBSD in the first place. -- ------------------------------------------------------------- Jimmy Wilkinson | Perfesser of Computer Science jimmy@cs.CofC.edu | The College of Charleston (843) 953-8160 | Charleston SC 29424 If there is one word to describe me, that word would have to be "profectionist". Any form of incompitence is an athema to me. Metathesis??? Don't ax me. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hubs" in the body of the message
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