[CentOS-devel] Re: [CentOS] Re: Jigdoes of CentOS 4.4 and 5.0 i386/x86_64 CD/DVD available.

[Maciej Żenczykowski]

Trimming centos@ from reply list.

> > It does use a list of mirros for the debian.  I haven't really looked
> > into it too deeply.
> > Furthermore the jigdo-lite program is really just a shell script -
> > should be easy to get it to behave however we want it (it just runs
> > wget).
> >
> > I would really like to see dynamic DNS resolution based on source IP
> > giving out the address of the nearest centos compatible mirror - then
> > it would 'just work'.
>
> see below re cnames ...

I know, and yet... this would still be the most useful way.  it would
make everything just work.

> we really need to push the bandwidth out to external mirrors - and 302's
> are messy ...

agreed. We can definitely do this, I'll have to take a look at how
this is done for debian (and how it chooses the closest mirror).  It'd
be nice not to have to reinvent the wheel.

Do we have a canonical list of mirrors?  How do we decide on a best
mirror for a given user?  (based on his IP? some sort of lookup? some
sort of ping times? some sort of cgi applet on the centos servers
which returns a customized to requestor ip list of mirrors?) etc...

> >> Otherwise it gets messy because mirrors have different file structures, so
> >> just using CNAME's wont work.
> >
> > And that's the problem... But we could possibly work with them to get
> > this working - at least for http this is relatively trivial (just
> > setup a virtual domain for whatever global name we would decide on
> > like mirror.centos.org).
>
> Except that is not what we do for mirror.centos.org - all those are our
> servers.

oh, didn't realize - I thought these were participating primary
mirrors.  you have a lot of these machines then :-)

> and http://www.metalinker.org/
>
> eg http://www.metalinker.org/samples/CentOS-4.4-i386-binDVD.iso.metalink

This is more like a auto-mirror system (a way to provide many
alternative url's for a file), then a way to stitch files from pieces.

Jigdo here offers the bonus of not having to store the CDs and DVDs on
the servers, and not having to download them over and over again if
you already have either a local mirror, or local CDs or DVDs and want
the opposite - and it decreases bandwidth when issuing an update,
respin, etc.  A fair number of packages will be upgraded with 4.5 -
but many many will remain the same, I'd guess a jigdo'ed release of
4.5 could get and burn the DVD/CDs while downloading about 20-30% of
the image size of data only.

Cheers,
Maciej