[CentOS-mirror] geo-ip/loadbalancing causing trouble for beta.centos.org

[Jonas Anden]

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