RCs for Everyone (was One (more) week slip of Fedora 11 Release)

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Michael Cronenworth <mike at cchtml.com> said:
> Sounds like the mirrors should use bitorrent? (then why not just let 
> users use bittorrent) This will be my last random thought today.

Bittorrent is not some magic wand.  The problem is just the volume of
bits that would have to be pushed out in a short period of time to be
useful.  To generate 25G+ of data and try to distribute it in a timely
fashion, Red Hat would have to dedicate large amounts of bandwidth for
just that purpose.  The bits would have to get from the point the ISOs
are generated to the public servers to at least some consumers (be they
mirrors or end-users).

Let's say you wanted to get 25G out (at least to the initial point of
distribution) in 4 hours.  That's an average line rate of about 14
megabits per second to distribute them to _one_ other site.  If you have
just 10 other sites trying to get them simultaneously, you'll need a
full OC-3 or a fractional gigabit ethernet link.

Also, mirrors aren't going to use Bittorrent to fetch bits because AFAIK
the automation is not available.  I have scripts wrapped around rsync to
keep things in sync (and even that still needs some "hand holding" now
and then).

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.