Re: Lack of mirrors for non-Ximian channels

You're pretty much correct.  Our mirrors typically don't have the disk
space to mirror all the distribution packages.  I suspect it might help
a great deal if certain packages were mirrored (thinking especially of
some of the glibc updates needed for XD2 installs).

-Mark Gordon

On Thu, 2003-06-26 at 18:43, Jim Prall wrote:
> I think I have found a huge gap in the Red Carpet "scheme-of-things." I'm
> writing in hopes that someone can set me straight or else confirm that, no,
> I'm not crazy, this is really true...
> 
> I have RedHat 7.3 (several machines) and I installed Red Carpet several
> weeks ago when Redhat's RHN stopped offering free access to their update
> tracking service. I subscribed to the Redhat 7.3 channel, got a list of
> urgent and suggested updates, and went to town installing them. At first, it
> worked just great. I started out with RedCarpet 1.x, then upgraded to 2.0
> when it came out.
> 
> This month, though, all my attempts to perform updates of packages from the
> Redhat 7.3 channel have been SOOO SLOOOW slow slow slow. I'm on a fast
> university connection, but I usually couldn't get above 4 or 5kb/sec. Well,
> I understand that the main Ximian servers can get loaded down. So I started
> choosing mirror sites. No joy - just as slow. So, I went online to search
> for reports about this problem. I read the archives of this list, and noted
> that (a) a bug report long ago mentioned failure of the software to apply a
> chosen mirror, but that was listed as fixed in Bugzille, and (b) there had
> been some problems with the main Ximian server for Red Carpet "basic" a
> while ago, but no mention of this in the last week or two.
> 
> I noticed that one update went a lot faster than others. When I looked in
> /var/log/rcd/rcd-messages, I saw that this one update came from the mirror I
> had selected. The log also confirmed that my mirror selection was being
> applied at each startup of the RC GUI (and was being displayed correctly in
> the prefs window.) The one file that updated fast was a package from the Red
> Carpet channel.  Hmmmm....
> 
> All my attempts to update *Redhat* packages went very slow, and showed up in
> the log as coming ONLY from
> rc-pkginfo.ximian.com/redhat-73-i386/redhat-73-i386/whatever-package-N.N.i38
> 6.rpm EVEN THOUGH just above that the log shows I was getting listings from
> my chosen mirror (either ximian.netnitco.net or ximian.orst.edu).
> So I decided to use a web browser to look at the mirror site.
> 
> Then it hit me: these are mirrors of Ximian packages - and only of those. I
> looked over the web directories of both the Netnitco and ORST mirrors, and
> they looked the same: all Ximian products, no other vendors (on that
> address/directory heirarchy, at least.)
> 
> So, Red Carpet's channels for other vendors' distributions do not have the
> benefit of any mirrors at all!
> 
> Whoa!
> 
> I have formed an inference that when I have a mirror selected (in rug or Red
> Carpet), but I try to get a package/update that is not part of the Ximian
> lineup carried by the Ximian mirror sites, Red Carpet (and rug)
> automatically revert back to Ximian's main server. It does find the file
> there, and starts retrieving it, but that server is really overloaded
> (and/or throttled for "basic" users).
> 
> So, am I missing something here, or is there a big gap in this mirroring
> strategy? Don't we need a way to have a separate list of mirrors for
> channels tracking non-Ximian distributions such as RedHat? There are of
> course lots of mirrors of RedHat packages. However, Red Carpet seems to be
> unable to take advantage of those, and must go back to Ximian's own servers
> for every non-Ximian package.
> 
> Please tell me if I'm missing the point here somehow.
> 
> P.S. And hey - thanks for the huge amount of work behind Red Carpet.
> --
> Jim Prall
> Systems Programmer
> The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
> University of Toronto
> http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall
> 
> 
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