I've done a bit of downloading of packages using the beta.centos.org hostname yesterday, and there are some issues because of geo-ip and load balancing being used.
When navigating the http://beta.centos.org/ site, some mirrors have different structure than others. Navigating the tree we sometimes get redirected out of http://beta.centos.org/centos/4.92/... and into a different structure (in the mirrorservice.org case, you'll sometimes end up on http://beta.centos.org/sites/beta.centos.org/centos/4.92...). I've noticed this with mirrorservice.org, the same may be true for other mirrors as well.
Now, this would be fine if it wouldn't be that the geo-ip/loadbalancing solution in place for beta.centos.org will land me on *different* servers a little now and then. Coming from the same source IP, I'm receiving different results to lookups. This makes the downloads fail with a 404 if I land on a different server when I click on the hyperlinks...
One possible solution would be to have the servers do a redirect to the real server name when contacted as beta.centos.org. That way all my subsequent navigation within the site would land on the same server (cluster).
The above problem report is a bit of 'informative'; since we've now synced up a local mirror here the problem is in effect gone *for*us*. It may still be causing headaches for others, though...
Since we're using centos on a number of servers here, we have a local mirror (we've only got a 2 Mbit link here and are only mirroring certain releases & architectures, so setting up a public mirror just wouldn't make sense). I've set it up to rsync from beta.centos.org for the beta release. This, too, is a bit of a headache due to load balancing...
Some mirrors do not support all switches recommended for rsyncing from mirrors. Particularily, the -H switch is not supported by mirrorservice.org and the rsync bails if we try to rsync with this flag. Other sites (don't remember which one, and can't reproduce it at the moment) don't support the -z flag, but doesn't bail but just ignores the -z flag.
Mirrorservice.org: Would it be possible for you to support the -H switch?
Thanks for your hard work, it is really appreciated. Almost all of our servers are running CentOS in some form.
// J