Why would anyone like to have a Fedora Mirror ?

[sankarshan]

I was being generally unhappy with the Mirror Admins of the two external 
  Fedora Mirrors in India and we collectively stumbled upon the eureka 
moment that we don't have straight answer to "why an university or any 
academic institution with a reasonable connection would like to have a 
Fedora Mirror, internally, if not externally"

Given the low number of torrent seeds and the increasing usage of 
rawhide bits for the OS, it becomes important to [i] have more mirrors 
[ii] more torrent seeds and [iii] more media via FreeMedia available.

mether would perhaps like to write about [iii] separately later. This 
mail is more about the question - what would be a compelling reason for 
an institution to have a Fedora mirror ?



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[A. Mani]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 12:51 PM, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay
<foss.mailinglists(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>   mether would perhaps like to write about [iii] separately later.
> This mail
>  is more about the question - what would be a compelling reason for an
>  institution to have a Fedora mirror ? 
It is a much better idea to have a local mirror, than to let a vast
horde of people download the same file again and again. Of course
those institutions that use proxy can cache the iso images. But that
is only the beginning. If X is a version of a distro ... then the
installs are bound to get bigger over time in various patterns.

 Every University must have a basic commitment towards the
intellectual, economic and social welfare of the society and that is
the more compelling reason. The institution in question needs to do
little here, but the possible benefits are substantial.

Best

A. Mani

-- 
A. Mani
Member, Cal. Math. Soc

[sankarshan]

Mani A wrote:

>   Every University must have a basic commitment towards the
>  intellectual, economic and social welfare of the society and that is
>  the more compelling reason. The institution in question needs to do
>  little here, but the possible benefits are substantial. 
That said it makes it easier to attack problems if some particular 
points are discussed and investigated. The underlying problem is that we 
  do need to make one big push towards getting more mirrors, even if 
they are internal at the beginning and getting more seeders for the torrents





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[Rahul Sundaram]

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote:
>  I was being generally unhappy with the Mirror Admins of the two
> external 
>   Fedora Mirrors in India and we collectively stumbled upon the eureka 
>  moment that we don't have straight answer to "why an university or any 
>  academic institution with a reasonable connection would like to have a 
>  Fedora Mirror, internally, if not externally"
>  
>  Given the low number of torrent seeds and the increasing usage of 
>  rawhide bits for the OS, it becomes important to [i] have more mirrors 
>  [ii] more torrent seeds and [iii] more media via FreeMedia available.
>  
>  mether would perhaps like to write about [iii] separately later. This 
>  mail is more about the question - what would be a compelling reason for 
>  an institution to have a Fedora mirror ? 
{Will post the free media details later]

Atleast in some of the universities, being affiliated with major free 
and open source software projects is very beneficial within the 
educational environment considering the long standing history of such 
establishments to Unix/Unix like systems. They would encourage more 
usage, experimentation and more informal relationships that can lead to 
short term projects (Google SoC, Internships), hires for the skill set 
based on practical projects instead of getting permanently struck in the 
fresher - no experience - no hire loop. IIT's have continued to bang on 
this very successfully and other smart colleges have adopted this model 
too. One particular point I heard from mirror admins is that a six month 
release cycle + fast updates can be problematic due to bandwidth 
limitations.

For the couple of official mirrors within India, they don't actually 
meet the stated requirements and have been given exceptions since having 
a bandwidth capped mirror is better than no mirror at all but as a 
consequence of this, they almost always time our/reject connections for 
yum updates. We probably to need to again get in touch with IIT folks 
and see if we can make progress on getting their internal/public mirror 
listed.  Note that mirror manager has a feature where a private mirror 
can be listed but hidden which allows all the internal users to be 
automatically redirected to the local mirror instead of the public ones 
which is a pretty nifty thing to do.

Rahul

[susmit shannigrahi]

>  We probably to need to again get in touch with IIT folks and see if
> we can make
>  progress on getting their internal/public mirror listed. 
If I remember correctly, you were talking to IITM in this regard.
Is there any update on that?

-- 
Regards,
Susmit.

=============================================
ssh
0x86DD170A
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/SusmitShannigrahi
=============================================

[susmit shannigrahi]

>   If I remember correctly, you were talking to IITM in this regard.
>   Is there any update on that? 
I meant IITC, sorry for the mistake.





-- 
Regards,
Susmit.

=============================================
ssh
0x86DD170A
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/SusmitShannigrahi
=============================================

[Rahul Sundaram]

susmit shannigrahi wrote:
> >  If I remember correctly, you were talking to IITM in this
> regard.
> >  Is there any update on that?
>  
>  I meant IITC, sorry for the mistake. 
That was during the last release. That petered out with no real results. 
We are going to try again.

Rahul

[Saurabh Jain (सौरभ जैन)]

Hi Guys

I have been trying to talk to NIXI about hosting Linux mirrors in
India. Working through the babudom is taking a lot of time, though.

Meanwhile, I host Fedora mirrors on a few servers I maintain here and
there. None of these have more than 2Mbps connectivity, which might
not be great, but is still good by India standards. Would it be useful
to have these added to the official Fedora Mirror list? We have no
connection limits or other such jazz. We just prioritise the SMTP and
IMAP traffic on these servers over the FTP traffic, so no one in
management complains about the mirror traffic.

Your thoughts please...

-Saurabh

[sankarshan]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:

>  That was during the last release. That petered out with no real
> results. 
>  We are going to try again. 
IIT Chennai / Madras is an option, IIT Mumbai is another (and they do 
have an internal mirror about which nothing much gets talked about). 
There are a lot of private institutes which seem to be taking a deep 
interest in producing Free / Open Source Software - would be nice to 
start getting folks from there on this list.

An internal mirror is a good thing to begin with. The underlying idea 
over here is to figure out how to get the os bits to people primarily to 
use and as an added benefit to contribute.

So, for example, I know of a person at Madhyamgram who syncs repos 
nearly daily and provides installation and related support to a lot of 
students nearby.




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[susmit shannigrahi]

>   I have been trying to talk to NIXI about hosting Linux mirrors in
>   India. Working through the babudom is taking a lot of time, though.
>
>   Meanwhile, I host Fedora mirrors on a few servers I maintain here and
>   there. None of these have more than 2Mbps connectivity, which might
>   not be great, but is still good by India standards. Would it be useful
>   to have these added to the official Fedora Mirror list? 
That will be too nice. :)

> We have no
>   connection limits or other such jazz. We just prioritise the SMTP and
>   IMAP traffic on these servers over the FTP traffic, so no one in
>   management complains about the mirror traffic. 
Once you are listed, you will need to have that restriction!!!
Otherwise you won't be able to open even a single web page, let alone
SMTP. (You will find it out yourself. You need not believe me :))
We generally get ~65000 hits a day and over 35 Gbs of transfer even with the
restriction. ;)

Still if we have many mirrors, we can overcome this problem as the
load will be shared.

>   Your thoughts please...
>
>   -Saurabh
>  


-- 
Regards,
Susmit.

=============================================
ssh
0x86DD170A
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/SusmitShannigrahi
=============================================

[Saurabh Jain (सौरभ जैन)]

>   IIT Chennai / Madras is an option 
IITM has always had a pubic mirror. Here it is:

ftp://ftp.iitm.ac.in/fedora/

Don't know if they want to have it listed in the public mirrors. Five
years back when I was at IITM, we wanted to be publicly listed, but
there was no Fedora or mirror concept at RedHat.

[sankarshan]

susmit shannigrahi wrote:

>  Once you are listed, you will need to have that restriction!!!
>  Otherwise you won't be able to open even a single web page, let alone
>  SMTP. (You will find it out yourself. You need not believe me :))
>  We generally get ~65000 hits a day and over 35 Gbs of transfer even with the
>  restriction. ;) 
and we are all waiting for that post from you on your experiences 
pertaining to giving tender loving care to the WBUT mirror :)




-- 

http://www.gutenberg.net - Fine literature digitally re-published
http://www.plos.org - Public Library of Science
http://www.creativecommons.org - Flexible copyright for creative work

[susmit shannigrahi]

>   Once you are listed, you will need to have that restriction!!!
>   Otherwise you won't be able to open even a single web page, let alone
>   SMTP. (You will find it out yourself. You need not believe me :))
>   We generally get ~65000 hits a day and over 35 Gbs of transfer even with the
>   restriction. ;) 

There is another thing I forgot to mention,
Suppose you don't restrict your traffic, and you have 256 httpd
connection,(default for apache).
So for each user, you assign (theoretically) 2048Kbps/256 = 8 Kbps.
Practically it will be still less :(. So that will slow down the whole
update system of fedora.

This is exactly why we had to limit our connection. :(


-- 
Regards,
Susmit.

=============================================
ssh
0x86DD170A
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/SusmitShannigrahi
=============================================

[Rahul Sundaram]

Saurabh Jain (सौरभ जैन) wrote:
>  Hi Guys
>  
>  I have been trying to talk to NIXI about hosting Linux mirrors in
>  India. Working through the babudom is taking a lot of time, though. 
Please keep following up. We are in real need for more mirrors as we are 
close to the Fedora 9 release. Some traffic details are at

http://fedoraproject.org/maps

>  Meanwhile, I host Fedora mirrors on a few servers I maintain here
> and
>  there. None of these have more than 2Mbps connectivity, which might
>  not be great, but is still good by India standards. Would it be useful
>  to have these added to the official Fedora Mirror list? We have no
>  connection limits or other such jazz. We just prioritise the SMTP and
>  IMAP traffic on these servers over the FTP traffic, so no one in
>  management complains about the mirror traffic.
>  
>  Your thoughts please... 
I am CC'ing our mirror admin, Matt Domsch  who you can get in touch with 
offlist and provide you more details.  Some information at

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Mirroring

Ignore the bandwidth requirements and follow the other instructions. 
Like I said, we have added the Indian mirrors despite not meeting our 
bandwidth requirements since it does to help to share the load.

Rahul

[A. Mani]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 10:54 AM, Rahul Sundaram
<sundaram(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:
>  Saurabh Jain (सौरभ जैन) wrote:
>
>  > Hi Guys
>  >
>  > I have been trying to talk to NIXI about hosting Linux mirrors in
>  > India. Working through the babudom is taking a lot of time, though.
>  >
>
>   Please keep following up. We are in real need for more mirrors as we are
>  close to the Fedora 9 release. Some traffic details are at
>  
It will also help if more detailed instructions on using p2p are
provided in appropriate pages.
Even adsl users can maintain better ratios.

Immediately after release, many Linux distros can be downloaded @ 1.2
-1.6 Mbps by torrent (on a 2Mbps connection), while that may fall to a
paltry .2 Mbps by direct download.  There are exceptions to the latter
aspect.

Best

A. Mani


-- 
A. Mani
Member, Cal. Math. Soc