Automated Mirror Selection [Re: Worst experience with Up2Date ever.]

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> said:
> But when up2date is
> run, up2date does some sort of selection among the mirrors in the
> mirrorlist
> ( http://fedora.redhat.com/download/up2date-mirrors/fedora-core-rawhide
> )  chooses a mirror to try to download packages from and then attempts
> to download the packages.

How is this mirror list created?  Looking at it right now, there are
only 6 servers listed (the Red Hat master plus 5 mirrors); aren't there
more mirrors than that that carry the rawhide tree?  Checking the other
up2date-mirrors files, there are a few more mirrors listed but not many.

How does up2date (or yum) handle a mirror not having what is being
looked for?  For example, mirror.hiwaay.net is in the list, but I don't
mirror all the rawhide architectures (just i386 and x86_64).  Does
up2date recognize a 404 and try another mirror?  Is this action
remembered?

One problem with syncing rawhide to mirrors is that the daily build and
push of rawhide to the master servers takes a different amount of time
(and so finishes at a different time) each day.  Some days, my sync
finishes before the push is complete, so until my mirror syncs again
(once a day), it will be effectively fubared. One thing I've considered
doing is to change my mirroring scripts to watch for actual file syncs
and loop (with a small delay) until the sync runs without changing any
files.  That would help, but there's still a period where my mirror of
the tree is not in sync.  I guess if I synced the header.info and
repodata files last and then deleted, I should always have a consistent
tree, but scripting that will be somewhat of a PITA.

-- 
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.