Why would anyone like to have a Fedora Mirror ?

[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