[CentOS-devel] setting up an emergency update route

Thu Feb 5 21:42:06 UTC 2015
Pierre-Yves Chibon <pingou at pingoured.fr>

On Thu, Feb 05, 2015 at 09:32:35AM +0000, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> > Obviously the rsync method where each mirror pretty much "does their own
> > thing" is dated and not optimal.  The "hi, I just updated my mirror,
> > here's what I have currently" script portion of MirrorManager can at
> > least help on the polling side so that you have a more accurate and
> > timely idea of which mirrors are up to date.  Leveraging that, or
> > similar, may be a small change that could help move things in the right
> > direction (and may or may not be part of a long-term way to improve
> > distro mirroring).
> 
> we tried this - people lied. Not everyone runs entire mirrors, and
> having this run client side dramatically increases the chances for a
> dirty mirror being accepted in. If we validate mirrors, it really must
> happen from an external source. Maybe publishing a checksum or some
> metadata that is used as a component of the overall yes/no might work.

For the record, this script primary use-case are private mirrors, those that are
within a firewall or network that we cannot reach, therefore, we have no way of
knowing if they are up to date or not. The only is to force them to tell us if
they are up to date and that is by running this script.

I believe all the publicly accessible mirrors are monitored by our crawler.

Pierre