[CentOS-mirror] A rant

Sat Jan 23 12:57:24 UTC 2016
Carsten Otto <otto at informatik.rwth-aachen.de>

Dear Cent OS mirror admins,
and also dear admins not related to CentOS,

this mail only regards the mailing list centos-mirror at centos.org and is
not related to specific mirroring issues. I kindly ask you to read it
nevertheless.

I'm an administrator of a mirror serving content of more than 50
projects, CentOS being one of them. As it happens, some things like
changed IP addresses, firewall issues, DNS changes, and bigger outages
need to be announced from time to time. Please read this message trying
to understand my perspective, wanting to serve as many projects with as
little effort as possible.

For this task, I have at least one contact address for each project. In
the case of CentOS it is this list. This list only accepts mails from
subscribers, which I learned the hard way. Based on this I have the
following suggestions and topics for discussion:

1) Open the mailing list to allow unsubscribed admins to send. This
works with almost all of the other projects, and I guess they are
perfectly fine with it. Try mirrors at debian.org,
mirror-list-d at redhat.com, mirror-admin at gentoo.org, admin at opensuse.org,
mirrors at ubuntu.com just to name a few.

2) If you decide against 1), at least INFORM the senders that their
messages are filtered out. In the past week I thought I was being
ignored, as I did not receive such mails. This obviously is not a
feeling you want to nurture in admins supporting your project.

3) (As a precaution) Make sure to reply to the original sender, not only
to the list. I don't want to receive the messages relating to specific
issues sent by OTHER mirror admins, as this is what I consider spam.
Those mails are not of any interest to me.

4) Make the "Mail delivery" option default to false. I appreciate that I
can disable receiving messages from other admins (see 3), but having to
set this up myself is putting even more work on my shoulders.

Thank you,
Carsten
-- 
Dr. Carsten Otto
http://verify.rwth-aachen.de/otto/
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