Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2003 15:50:16 +0200 (CEST) From: Oliver Fromme <olli@lurza.secnetix.de> To: dan@langille.org (Dan Langille) Cc: Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> Subject: Re: Requirements Final Draft Attempt #2 :-/ Message-ID: <200308011350.h71DoGO5008432@lurza.secnetix.de> In-Reply-To: <3F283725.11219.7DFB7A87@localhost> from "Dan Langille" at Jul 30, 2003 09:22:45 PM
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Dan Langille wrote:
> On 30 Jul 2003 at 14:19, Garrett Wollman wrote:
> > <<On Tue, 29 Jul 2003 01:26:19 -0400, Ken Smith <kensmith@cse.Buffalo.EDU> said:
> > > 5) Will be given a "ftpX.CC.freebsd.org" hostname and will be a candidate
> > > for becoming a "ftpX.freebsd.org" hostname.
> >
> > > 3) Will be given a "ftpX.CC.freebsd.org" name.
> >
> > I think that this would be more helpful if sites were categorized
> > along a different axis: architecture. It doesn't make sense to
> > require every primary mirror site everywhere in the world to carry
> > every architecture. Few people outside of Japan, for example, have
> > need of PC98 releases. Other places may want to cut out Alpha or
> > sparc64 bits if those distributions are very infrequently downloaded.
Sounds very reasonable.
> That can be done with additional DNS zones can't it? Categorize them
> by what they carry.
To be honest, I don't really like the idea of bloating the
DNS name space. Maybe I misunderstood the suggestion, but
I think that -- for example -- ftp3.fr.i386.freebsd.org is
just too complicated. Our DNS structure is already complex
enough as it is. And such distinction would not indicate
which releases and package sets the site carries. Does it
have -current packages? Does it have ISOs, or only the
FTP install directories? etc...
A few months ago someone mentioned another idea on this
list, which I would like to repeat. An automated mechanism
could contact every FTP server (say, once per day) and
check which collections that server is carrying, i.e. which
releases and architectures, whether they have ISOs and the
FTP install directories, and which package sets are there.
That information would be collected and converted into a
"survey" of all FreeBSD mirror sites. This file should
be easy to parse. That survey would be put on the master
FTP server, and _every_ mirror would be required to sync
that particular file often enough (say, once per day).
It could be called /pub/FreeBSD/.mirror-info or whatever.
That way, every mirror -- no matter whether primary or
secondary (or not even an official one) -- would carry
a file describing all official mirrors of FreeBSD.
Sysinstall could be taught to get that file, once the user
has selected a mirror site, and verify that the site really
contains what the user needs. If it doesn't, it should
warn the user and suggest a list of alternative sites.
The survey could also be automatically converted to some
HTML table and put on the web site. A "README" file on
the FTP servers should point to that URL, so users can
find out where to get the ISOs (or whatever) that they
want, if they can't get them on the server they're on.
All of that might sound complicated, but it really isn't
that bad. The collector can be a small shell script using
/usr/bin/fetch or automated ncftp. The extension to
sysinstall shouldn't be too difficult either. I would be
willing to work on the collector thing at least, and maybe
also on the sysinstall part (if time permits).
The advantage would be that there is no need to change the
DNS structure, and mirror maintainers would not have to do
anything special, except for syncing that mirror-info file
once per day (unless they're syncing everything daily
anyway). Once the collector mechanism is in place, no
additional maintenance would be necessary.
Comments?
Regards
Oliver
--
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.
Encrypting transactions on the Internet is the equivalent of
arranging an armored car to deliver credit-card information
from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on
a park bench.
-- Eugene Spafford (computer scientist, Purdue Univ.)
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