On Wed, 27 Nov 2002, Haesu wrote:
> They have a unified DNS convention for all mirror operators, and they
> welcome any new mirrors whether or not it's 10 or 100 mirrors in total.
> Each mirror is given ftp and www.<mirror's preferred
> handle>.lkams.kernel.org hostname pointing to their IP address.
>
> I think we can do the same. Once we do, may be we should utilize a
> script or something that's scheduled. The script would query all mirrors
> in the DNS listing and do a GET /dist , etc to see if the mirror is up
> to date or not.. Each mirror should be marked with 'points' where if the
> mirror is not up to date, the script would hold a threshold of how many
> points the out-of-date mirror will hit before getting delisted, or
> getting warned. If a mirror is down.. same deal..
I think both of these are fine ideas. We just need someone willing to
step forward with an implementation. :-)
Everybody has expressed a lot of factors of what makes a good mirror, but
if we combined those into a numerical "mirror quality quotient" and listed
that information on the site it would naturally help people find the right
mirror for them. To start things off I propose:
b + 48/r - a/4
Where:
- b is bandwidth in Mbps
- r is how many hours between rsyncs
- a is how many point releases your apache is behind
I can think of many occasions when I would have loved to have something
like this when trying to pick a mirror out of hundreds of choices.
--
</chris>
Programming is a Dark Art, and it will always be. The programmer is
fighting against the two most destructive forces in the universe:
entropy and human stupidity. They're not things you can always
overcome with a "methodology" or on a schedule.
-Damian Conway, Perl God
