[Centos] why developers got stuck with huge ISP bill

Tue Nov 16 02:24:50 UTC 2004
Matt Shields <mattboston at gmail.com>

Since a way to automatically detect which is the closest mirror may
take a while, and there are a ton of people still pointed at the
master mirror server I decided to do a test.

I got the Yum source and recompiled it using a new yum.conf and upped
the version number.  Then put it in my local repository(I cache all
packages locally so I only download them once) and then I ran yum
update and it saw the new package and updated yum.conf.  Although it
wouldn't be good to assume that people wanted to use 1 specific
mirror, it would get the burden off the master mirror.

You could also push a broken yum.conf where the baseurl is something
like http://go.to.caosity.org.to.change.your.mirror/ then when someone
does a yum update they will get an error "Error getting file
http://go.to.caosity.org.to.change.your.mirror/" and post a notice on
the main webpage telling people the reason it was broken and give them
the link to the mirrors page and the explain the reason why yum was
intentionally broken.

Another option would be to setup a list of whitelisted IPs (active
mirrors) that can use the master mirror server, all other addresses
are blacklisted.  This wouldn't involve the end user updating yum, and
would protect your bandwidth.

Although none of these are the ideal situation, you need to do
something to protect yourselves from another high isp bill.  These
would be quick fixes till permanent solution can be found.

Matt


On Mon, 8 Nov 2004 00:37:41 +0100 (CET), Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Nov 2004, Matt Shields wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> > I'm new here.  I just caught this thread and checked my yum.conf.  It
> > does indeed point to the main mirror.  May I suggest that the default
> > yum.conf file contain a links to some of the public mirrors, or none
> > at all instead of the main mirror.
> >
> > That way, it doesn't point to the main mirror, which would be reserved
> > for public mirrors.  Then in the Docs show an example yum.conf that
> > shows what is acceptable.
> >
> > Another suggestion would be to put a few public mirrors in the
> > yum.conf file and comment them out.  Then put in a comment saying
> > "Here are a few public mirrors, but you can get mirrors closer to you
> > by looking at http://www.centos.org/download/mirrors"
> 
> The clamav projects recently started with different mirrors with an ISO
> country code. They have db.CC.clamav.net and when installing a package the
> configuration is being changed based on the configuration in
> /etc/sysconfig/clock.
> 
> The code can be found here (see %post section):
> 
>         http://svn.rpmforge.net/svn/trunk/rpms/clamav/clamav.spec
> 
> And it would allow you to maintain and balance load based on the DNS zone
> information.
> 
> Although of course the number of network hops and network latency is not
> directly related to the physical distance (or even country borders).
> 
> --   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
> [Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]
>