not all mirrors are created equal - 2 suggestions

[Matt Domsch]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 01:48:39PM -0400, Nada O'Neal wrote:
> Hi webmaster,
> 
> I'm physically located at Columbia University, so when I tried to 
> download a Fedora 13 install DVD iso from either of these two pages:
> 	http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options#architecture
> 	http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-all
> 
> I went straight to the Columbia mirror - which, by the way, is pretty 
> awesome. But, Columbia does not have the DVD iso files, either for 
> 32-bit or 64-bit:
> 	http://mirror.cc.columbia.edu/pub/linux/fedora/releases/13/Fedora/x86_64/iso/
> 	http://mirror.cc.columbia.edu/pub/linux/fedora/releases/13/Fedora/i386/iso/

Actually, it does, but not visible via http, only visible via ftp.
Welcome to older and/or 32-bit apache not able to serve up files that
are >2GB in size, not even to put them on the index.
 
> ... I'm going to try to complain to the right people here about that. 
> (ha ha!)

I've copied them here.

>
> But, I wanted to suggest for your website that:
> 
> (a) it might be possible, in the magic you're using to connect people to 
> the closest mirror, to also double-check that that mirror has the file 
> available, and if not, connect the person to the next-closest; and

MirrorManager does this.  In this case, the Columbia mirror reports to
MirrorManager that they have all the files (and in fact they do).

But Columbia is also a private mirror, so we don't send the
MirrorManager crawler at it to verify.  We trust what they report, and
what they're reporting _is_ correct, mostly...

> 
> (b) it might also be possible to make it a little more intuitive to know 
> where to go if the mirror is broken.

That's trickier.  From get.fedoraproject.org, we are simply doing an
HTTP redirect, and at that point, we can't know if the redirect
succeeded or failed.

The real answer is for mirrors to use the suggested apache
configurations we provide at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Mirroring, to redirect
requests for ISOs (which are the only files we post that are >2GB at
this time) over to their FTP server, which can serve such files.

> 
> These are whiny because in real time, it took me maybe all of two 
> minutes to find the "all download methods" in the lower right corner, 
> then find the "let me look around..." "see all mirrors" links at the 
> bottom of that page, but of course two minutes of real time is seven 
> million years of subjective web navigation time. Some kind of "mirror 
> broken?" direct link might work.

I'm open to ideas to make this better, but I don't technically know
how to implement what you're asking for...

> 
> Thanks.
> 
> - Nada O'Neal

Thanks,
Matt
Fedora Mirror Wrangler and MirrorManager author

-- 
Matt Domsch
Technology Strategist
Dell | Office of the CTO