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

[archive-admin at mirrorservice.org]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, Jonas Anden wrote:

> 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.

Ok made this do a redirect for now while I work on a better solution so at
least it will work for the users.

giving out an ip reather than sat a pointer means if say you take an  ip
out of service (I have five user facing) it will bork unless ip failover
is implmented rather than just letting them ammend the vhost ip address...

>
> 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?
Shot answer we have 8.5TB of mirrors spread over 8 backed servers...
and rsync is botched to work with a user vfs that presents this as a
single fs that doesn't support hardlinks... so not in the immediate
future...


>
> Thanks for your hard work, it is really appreciated. Almost all of our
> servers are running CentOS in some form.
>
>   // J
>
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-- 
Archive Admin's at The UK Mirror Service
http://www.mirrorservice.org/