Fedora Rel-Eng Meeting Recap 2007-JUN-11

Brent brent at brentnorris.net
Tue Jun 12 18:34:05 UTC 2007


Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-06-12 at 21:44 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>   
>> Jeremy Katz wrote:
>>     
>>>> 1) Mirrors allegedly have a problem:
>>>>
>>>> What exactly are they complaining about?
>>>>         
>>> They're complaining that it erodes the value that they provide to us.
>>> And that if we do that, then there's a lot less reason for them to
>>> mirror and help us out.  
>>>       
>> If other mirrors are more occupied then does it erode the value of the 
>> one mirror which is not being used as much? If I distribute the software 
>> via Free Media program, online or retail shops, magazines and books, 
>> does it erode their value? We are always going to be distributing our 
>> software in more than one way and if some ways are more faster or 
>> efficient than the rest we should do that. This seems a rather odd thing 
>> for a mirror to be complaining about. How many are complaining?
>>     
>
> No, but in all of those cases, people aren't going and using bandwidth
> to the world as opposed to local bandwidth.  Also, they're fine with
> torrent being available, but making it available _EARLIER_ is the
> problem.
>   
I think one really great way to help with this problem is if there was a 
way to have the mirrors run torrent seeds too.  If that were to happen 
then the local network mirrors thing would pretty much automagically 
work itself out.  If the people in the LAN know about the FTP/HTTP 
mirror they use it, if they don't most of the good Bittorrent software 
tries hard to find local nodes to connect to.  So torrent users would 
still get it using the LAN _mostly_ and the mirrors would also be 
helping to seed the torrents during the slow beginning part.

It does mean that mirrors might have more bandwidth being used on their 
external links, but if they are a mirror they are probably ok with that 
bandwidth being used.  I don't see why they would care if it is with 
HTTP, FTP, or torrent.  Also the more mirrors you have using it the more 
feasible it becomes to start looking at the possibility of maybe doing 
updates via the torrent network or something like that.  Things like 
that make the mirror lists start to become obsolete.

Just some thoughts.

Brent




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