[Mageia-discuss] Mirror

Wed Mar 9 15:01:36 CET 2011

Le mercredi 09 mars 2011 à 13:34 +0100, Juergen Harms a écrit :
+> I have now arranged for a mirror to be set up at CUI - my old lab at the 
+> university of Geneva - I hope it will come up in time for alpha-2.
+
+That sound great, thanks.
+
+> CUI is glad to help, but that is not a permanent solution - CUI normally 
+> does not provide this kind of service - permanent mirroring services 
+> should be provided by Switch as soon as a stable Mageia release becomes 
+> available. I will pursue the discussion with Switch.
+
+Ie, not permanent, do you know how and why this would stop ?
+
+> Talking to people at Switch brought up some facts which Mandriva should 
+> be aware of:
+>   - There is a heritage of bad experience that has been made with Mandriva.
+>   - It is not the first time that I hear the argument Mageia = Mandriva 
+> = forgetit.
+>   - Mageia happens at present to be perceived as "just another one of 
+> those distros that appear and disappear to oblivion" (maybe with a 
+> component of unfriendlyness towards Linux).
+
+IMHO, our best bet for such case is to wait, so people can make their
+minds and reconsider their position. I am not sure that trying to push
+now is good. It take time to recover trust and make people forget where
+do we come from.
+
+Our problem is that if we say "we are a mandriva fork", people think of
+their bad experiences. If we don't, we appear as just yet another
+distro.
+
+So maybe it would be better to engage first with people that do not have
+negative experience with Mandriva rather than trying to convince people
+who did have ?
+
+> By the way, at my university there was a similar experience: Mandriva 
+> was part of the officially supported infrastructure (mirror, 
+> consultancy), with fees paid to Mandriva - that broke in dysharmony due 
+> to bad administrative response from Mandriva, leaving quite some ill 
+> feeling. Sorry if I wade through these negative arguments, but these 
+> beyond-the-enthusiast-user spotlights count.
+
+Well, we should make clear to people that we started the project for the
+same reasons that they broke from Mandriva, and that we are aware of the
+problems. But IMHO, we should not try too hard to convince them to help
+us, just say that we agree with them. The rest will come by itself.
+
+> I think that, when the stable release approaches, a small campaign to 
+> rectify these prejudices would be an excellent thing.
+
+That sound like a delicate task ( for the aforementioned reasons of
+PR ). How would you start ?
+
+> Talking with the people at Switch who maintain the Switch mirroring 
+> service, there were also some concrete and technical arguments - I 
+> quote, translating from German:
+>   "the communication with the mirror sites at Mandriva had already been 
+> minimal, compared with other distros: announcing releases, checking the 
+> availability at the mirrors (QA), etc" (which is a mere quote, dont ask 
+> me to interpret).
+>
+> Switch is reluctant to maintain a mirror at "assembly language level" 
+> ("just run rsync every 2 hours"), they would prefer solutions using 
+> something like MirrorBrain - but probably Mandriva experiences are part 
+> of the background to this argument.
+
+Well, what do they need more precisely ?
+
+We understand well that they do not want to micromanage the mirror ( I
+think no one does ), but then they can for sure understand that we
+cannot adapt to everybody too on our side ( ie, another kind of micro
+management ). 
+
+And for mirrorbrain, I do not see how this relate to rsync, as the
+software is used on distro side to distribute mirrors lists, if I
+understand well. Rsync is still used to mirror around.
+
+If I remember, the problem of switch was "there is not enough users to
+justify the mirroring" ( as you explained before ), and I do not think
+this will be solved until one or two years, nor that mirrorbrain will
+produce more users by magic.
+
+So maybe we should just wait to be credible when asking something to
+them and be honest about that ?
+
+> At present, putting a mirror on a univeristy site puts it into an 
+> environment which is in good match to the straightforward rsync approach 
+> - correct for the alpha period of Mageia.
+
+Given the high number of university for all others distributions, I
+think this is a good match for most of them :)
+
+> But I think that on the long-run there are lessons to be learned from 
+> the discussion with Switch - mirrors for a stable Mageia should be 
+> preferably hosted at professionally run mirror sites (who make the kind 
+> of consideration I quoted above), university solutions should come as 
+> additional icing. In case of a second round of discussion on how to 
+> organise Mageia mirrors, it might be a good idea to have that discussion 
+> with some participation from the mirror sites.
+
+I do not understand what you mean by "professionally run mirror". I 
+think this doesn't mean what you want it to mean.
+
+Switch.ch core "business" is not to run mirrors, this is to sell
+connectivity ( to swiss schools ). The core "business" of a university
+is not to host mirrors, but researchers and students.
+
+>From my point of view, there is 2 motivations ( that can be
+overlapping ): 
+- people who run mirrors to help free software
+- people who run mirrors because this help them on various level
+
+A mirror can help to save bandwidth ( for example, free.fr is a french
+provider, all linux user will likely go on their mirror as this is
+faster ), or to leverage this for peering/trafic negotiation ( see
+http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/peering-and-transit.ars , I
+also recommend to see http://www.blogg.ch/uploads/peering-playbook.pdf ,
+given at the end of the article ). 
+
+I think most universities does this to help free software, and because
+they use internally. I think most volunteer-run mirrors, like the one of
+Wobo fall in this category too.
+
+On the contrary, I suppose that most operators ( like switch to some
+extend, but for free.fr, belgacom, etc ) does this for peering/trafic
+reasons, and that mean they need to have enough traffic for this to be
+useful for them, and enough users to justify the need. For now, I do not
+think we are in a position to be interesting to this kind of mirrors.
+
+So what we could do is to ask for some metrics so we could now when we
+will be able to reach a agreement, and try to have a multiple step
+plan :
+- first, we try to engage some universities ( or likely minded admins,
+such as kernel.org, or others ), to cope with the load of the
+distribution. Some being 4/5. 
+
+- based on the feedback, we make sure that the documentation is correct,
+that our procedure works, etc, etc.
+
+- once we have more and more people ( with metrics that have to be
+found ), we try to find more mirrors.
+
+- once we are interesting enough to engage people in the connectivity
+business, then we try to engage them ( likely not before one or two
+years, maybe more ).
+
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+
+