Nick -- Oh most definitely. One thought I had previously was an opt-in where users who update with yum can opt to have transfer rates sent back to centos.org. But that's treading into deep waters...
When I say "test the server" I mean in a distributed sense. I.e. multiple servers are checking from many geographically diverse regions. Any one faulty checking server can easily be identified in a sea of working ones. That idea pushes up the bandwidth usage for checking, however. But even if checking uses a gigabyte of bandwidth per month, that's nothing compared to the overall bandwidth they will see in the same time period. Some acceptable ground should be there somewhere.
--Graham
On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 4:20 PM, Nick Olsen Nick@141networks.com wrote:
Only problem I see with this is it would be dependent on what the mirror could pull from the other mirrors. Lets say the "checking" server is in the US, and the server being checked is in Australia. It might hand out 10Gb/s to local users, But it doesn't get used because its marked bad, All because the checking server is far away(network wise). Or lets say the "checking" server has some sort of bandwidth issue, Then they all get marked poor... Lots of things to consider on this one.