[CentOS] Mirror Mirror on the wall, who is the slowest of them all? CentOS

Sat Mar 18 15:56:33 UTC 2006
Johnny Hughes <mailing-lists at hughesjr.com>

Just for the record.  3 of the arches we support have respun trees and
are totally ready to go (i386, x86_64, ia64).  These were ready to go on
the 3rd day after release.  They are currently syncing to our 100
external public mirrors.

There was, however a showstopper problem with ypserver that rendered NIS
login authorizations worthless.  This issue was fixed by the CentOS team
(and integrated into our install CD) prior to it's release by the
upstream provider.

Also integrated into this release is boot support for both the i586 and
i686 kernels on the standard i386 CD .. something that the upstream
provider does not do .. so that people who need dd= driver image support
can use existing RHEL drivers and i686 boot kernel, while i586 users
(not even supported upstream) can also use our product.

Also, there are several problems (Glade, libtool, apr) that don't work
when built as provided ... and without fixes they are worthless.  We
need to analyze those fixes and see if they were still necessary.  There
were other things that used to be a problem (dhcp, thunderbird, etc.)
where patches that we required on the last version were no longer
required and where removed.

There are also the logistics of rolling these trees to more than 100
mirrors all over the world ... a problem that "other fast distro" does
not need to worry about.

There is also an unresolved issue concerning glibc and the building of
anaconda on the the new release. This issue will not be fixed (most
likely) by release time.

If you remember, the last update did not go well because it was rushed
out the door ... and upgrades stated happening prior to all external
mirrors being updated.  Something that we will not repeat.

We have done several things to not repeat those mistakes .... including
a geoip enabled update system that passes out geographically relevant,
non-stale (meaning only updated) mirrors.  There is no distro out there,
rebuild or not, that provides this type of updates that I am aware of.  

Gentoo is the closest .. they provide a process that you can spend an
hour testing ... and it will tell you the best servers at that point in
time. You can then update your configuration.

That system does not poll mirrors for freshness, nor is there a way to
look at which mirror is fastest NOW ... both aspects that our mirror
system now provides.

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