[CentOS-mirror] Unresponsive or outdated nodes in mirror.centos.org

[Lance Davis]

On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Zenon Panoussis wrote:

> 
> Hi everyone
> 
> At http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=2217&forum=6
> I expressed some dismay at the fact that several of the update
> mirrors are broken or outdated. I also proposed some remedies
> for the problem.

I think you may have misunderstood the fact that all of the servers that 
are referenced as mirror.centos.org are managed and maintained by the 
CentOS team - they are not external mirrors.

Yes - at certain times those machines may not respond - usually due to 
excessive load caused by a major (Ux) update - although hardware falure is 
not unknown.

 > 
> Since nobody has replied there, I thought I'd better bring the
> issue here.
> 
> I wrote a script which checks header.info on all parts of both
> distributions on all update mirrors using http headers only,
> thus a totally negligible amount of bandwidth, and then modifies
> sdb_ldap DNS zone records for mirror.centos.org to only reflect
> good mirrors. Of course it could run against a plain vanilla
> BIND too, but sdb_ldap has the great advantage that it eliminates
> the need to reload after every zone change, so that removing bad
> mirrors from and re-inserting repaired ones into the round-robin
> can be done really often.
> 

Sounds like a good and useful idea - although dynamic dns updates 
certainly dont require bind to be reloaded ... updates being kept in the 
.jnl file and the zone file is only rewritten at intervals, to be used on 
a reload/restart. Having said that - I havent experience of bind ddns 
being used for rrdns ...

Is the sdb_ldap part of CentOS or sometng that would need to be 
installed/maintained separately ??

> To go along with the script, I also wrote an sdb_ldap .ldif for
> mirror.centos.org.
> 
> Is there any interest to implement any of this?
> 

Yes - definitely 

Especially if it may also allow us to extend the mirror. schema out to 
external mirrors, and tie in with the stuff we are working on for 
mirrorlist ...

Regards
Lance

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