Fedora Core brevity vs server upgrades

[William Hooper]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 16:04, William Hooper wrote:
>
>> Jay Lee wrote:
>>
>>> wgetting
>>> http://fedora.redhat.com/download/up2date-mirrors/updates-released-fc
>>> 3
>>> shows a list of possible mirrors and I assume yum randomly selects one
>>> to use each time (resulting in each request behind a proxy hitting a
>>> different mirror).  What would be ideal is if that url was dynamic
>>> and returned a single mirror url for yum to use.
>>
>> You would loose the ability to fail over to another mirror if something
>>  was wrong with that one URL.  Also you would increase load on the
>> fedora.redhat.com server because it would have to generate this file
>> for every request rather than serving a static file.
>
> On the other hand, if DNS returned multiple addresses for one name,
> the load would be spread among the sites automatically,

Which happens now.

> caching proxies
> would do the right thing,

I'm sure that would depend on the proxy and your definition of "the right
thing".  Caching metadata is a hinderence, not a feature.

> you wouldn't have to keep redistributing the
> mirror list,

It's 2K, not that big of a deal.

> and failing over could be handled by the application (even IE
> does this nicely so it can't be that hard...).

Yum handles fail over now, by going to the next mirror if it contact the
current one, and going to the next mirror if you hit Ctrl-C.

> The down side is that the participating target sites
> all have to be configured so the URLs can be the same.

Which is a pretty big downside looking at the existing mirror list.

-- 
William Hooper