[CentOS] DAG repo problem (continuation)

[Dag Wieers]

On Sun, 4 Dec 2005, Henk van Lingen wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 04, 2005 at 01:28:09PM -0700, Greg Knaddison wrote:
>   > 
>   > What to consider is that you (more dominik) are biting a hand that
>   > feeds you for free not only in giving you rebuilt rpms that magically
>   > work on your system but also that the site is a test bed for one of
>   > the most important pieces of software in the world used by millions of
>   > people a day (Apache).
>   > 
>   > So maybe a little patience, assistance in solving the problem, and
>   > perhaps even gratitude/donation would be in order rather than just
>   > "OMG, dag's site provided me an RPM and then the update is broken and
>   > I emailed him and it has taken a week to solve the problem!" which is
>   > how I read you and Dominik's messages.
> 
>   I'm not biting anyone. I'm very happy with the stuff Dag does. I'm just
>   saying it isn't very reliabe and informative at times. Concerning the
>   donation: I'm mirroring his stuff (except fedora/ at the moment) for
>   some years now. Last year I mailed him about it, in case he wanted
>   mirrors used (no answer), I saw this week my mirror is now included
>   (without me knowing it) on his website. That's fine with me. (I have
>   an apache mirror on the same box, btw).
>   For a system as popular as Dag's, it doesn't look sane to me to have
>   your main mirror on a testbox, right? There have to be other mirrors/
>   people who would be happy to help him, i think. 
> 
>   Maybe that RPMforge-thing is a platform to discus things like this.
>   But for all I can see it is very quiet there. Should I have mailed
>   them instead of Dag about broken RPM's? Maybe, I don't know.

Guys, I don't have the time to run after HEAnet to fix things. Most of the 
times, after a while, everything is back ok. Sometimes Matthias 
(freshrpms) can remove files from the mirror so rsync can re-sync 
broken files. (But that was when HEAnet had NFS corruption problems)
Matthias is the only person that can access my files since it's being 
hosted under his documentroot at HEAnet.

I requested access 2 times, but did not get a reply. I bet they have the 
same email-problem as me :-)

Other problems are due to the experimental Apache they are using (since 
they are one of the largest mirrors on this planet it's important for the 
Apache project) or other technical problems. (NFS, rsync) Since I don't 
have access to the mirror, it's very hard to debug the problem I cannot 
verify eg. that a file is wrong on disk or just goes hay-wire when being 
send by Apache. If mirrors do not have this problem, it's not an Apache 
problem, but since all mirrors mirror from HEAnet, it could still be an 
NFS corruption problem or something else.

The only way for me to fix inidividual reported files is by bumping the 
release number, rebuilding and uploading to my server.

Since I don't know how much traffic is being used every day it's 
impossible for me to consider other mirrors as main mirror.

I get swamped by mails of people (about 50 per day) and I have no spare 
time anymore. If people would report to the RPMforge mailinglists, most of 
the duplicate reports would be gone.

If you have problems, the best way to get my attention (by email) is to 
send an analysis of the problem. E.g. if you only say this or that file 
seems to be corrupt, I do not have the time to investigate myself.

I have had harddisk problems (several times this year), since last week my 
buildsystem is crashing randomly (after 15min to 1 hours of running) and I 
do not even have the time to look into that. (I spend my whole sunday 
analysing and swapping hardware, to no avail) So that makes it impossible 
to log on to my system, build something else. And since I'm seldom home I 
can't even reboot the damn thing.

RPMforge currently only comprises of Matthias, Dries and me. Other people 
are welcome to send fixes or problem-analysis. If you want to help, please 
don't simply send a report. If you have suggestions on how we can provide 
more information so you can help analysing problems, let me know.

We currently provide buildlogs, SPEC files, patches, SVN commitlogs and 
packagelists and buildenv packagelists.

But besides all that, I'm doing fine.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]