[CentOS-mirror] Mirror: centos-canada.vdssunucu.com.tr listed as Canadian mirror

Tue Nov 17 23:11:28 UTC 2020
Richard Muise <richardmuise.ca at gmail.com>

Fabian,
     Sorry I had missed the original messages from the previous weekend. My search-fu is poor I guess. I see the thread now.

     My comments apply to both centos-canada.altinsoft.net and centos-canada.vdssunucu.com.tr. They were both added in the same thread, Nov 8th and Nov 14th respectively, and by the same email address (support @ altinsoft.net). The domain servers for the second mirror is listed as ns*.onecloudserver.net, which is also tied to Altinsoft.

     Altinsoft.net is a hosting company, and their contact page only lists their location as Turkey: https://www.altinsoft.net/contact. Their terms of service also clearly indicates that Altinsoft is Turkish company (see Supplier here: https://www.altinsoft.net/terms-of-service - quote “AltınSoft Information Technologies, a private company incorporated and registered in the Republic of Turkey…”).

     Checking their hosting information, they state they have servers around the world, including Canada https://www.altinsoft.net/canada-ca-dedicated-servers (quote “Our Canada location servers are hosted in the OVH Canada data center).

     So that confirms what Darrell and Jonathan reported - Canadian GeoIP because it is hosted in the OVH data centre. But I cannot find any information to indicate that Altinsoft, the company paying for this mirror, is not situated in Turkey. I cannot guess the reason why a Turkish company would choose to host a Centos Mirror for Canada when they do not appear to be hosting any for users in Turkey (I checked the 28 mirrors for Turkey).

    Finally, and this is just an opinion, but the mail in the mailing list did not sound like a native English or French speaker. “We've sent it before, but we haven't received an answer What is the problem”, “Thank you for help” and “Please change.".

     Perhaps this is not enough grounds to change the mirror list, but it does raise a number of flags.

     Thank you for responding and pointing me to GeoIP, which I had not used before. And thank you for the work to maintain the list. I’ve been a volunteer in other projects, and I know it’s hard to balance incoming requests vs full-time work and family.



> On Nov 17, 2020, at 11:14 AM, Fabian Arrotin <arrfab at centos.org> wrote:
> 
> On 17/11/2020 16:59, Richard Muise wrote:
>> I’d like to suggest that the mirror centos-canada.vdssunucu.com.tr
>> <http://centos-canada.vdssunucu.com.tr> should not be listed as a
>> Canadian mirror. The IP look indicates the virtual host is in Turkey,
>> not Canada. Perhaps it should be listed under Turkey mirrors instead.
>> 
>> I searched the Centos-mirror mailing list and could not find any
>> discussion of this site before.
>> 
>> Thanks.
>> 
> 
> I know it looked "strange" by looking at vhost/fqdn, but GeoIP lookup
> confirmed (from our pre-flight check) that it's indeed in Canada
> 
> And here is the original request that arrived on mailman, so yes, it was
> discussed :
> https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-mirror/2020-November/024530.html
> 
> Do you have other GeoIP DB/proof that server isn't located in Canada ?
> -- 
> Fabian Arrotin
> The CentOS Project | https://www.centos.org
> gpg key: 17F3B7A1 | twitter: @arrfab
> 
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