The updates firehose

[Matt Domsch]

On Sun, Jun 10, 2007 at 11:30:47AM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le samedi 09 juin 2007 ?? 20:31 -0500, Matt Domsch a ??crit :
> 
> > You can add your local private mirror to mirrormanager, add a netblock
> > that covers your address space, and all your clients will then pull
> > from your local mirror rather than public mirrors, with no change on
> > the clients.
> 
> That's nice but if the infrastructure was friendlier to proxies most big
> entities wouldn't have to setup any mirror but could just rely on their
> existing proxy infrastructure
> 
> - mirrormanager should return data with high expire values and/or detect
> squid/mod_proxy whatever and direct it to a static mirror

Mirrormanager just returns a yum mirrorlist, which is updated hourly,
and is very fast to return (under 0.5s almost all the time).  Not sure
how caching will help this.

We don't presently do what openSUSE does, which is handle all the
mirror redirection on the back-end.  In their case, their yum
mirrorlist-like thing only ever returns one answer:
download.opensuse.org/path/to/repo/, and then they take the request
for download.opensuse.org/path/to/repo/file.rpm and do a temporary HTTP
redirect to the actual site they want to refer that particular user
to.  This gives them the ability to see every RPM download request
(for statistical purposes), and presumably the user-side proxies might
cache the downloaded RPM (not sure how that would work with the
redirect though).  As it stands, user-side proxies can't really cache
effectively, because they may get told to use a different mirror for
every yum invocation.

> - yum should generate proxy-friendly metadata

It's static files from yum, yes?  What's not proxy-friendly about
that?

I'm open to all suggestions, and patches are welcome!
-Matt

-- 
Matt Domsch
Software Architect
Dell Linux Solutions linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux
Linux on Dell mailing lists @ http://lists.us.dell.com