On 2006-10-31 16:15, Trevor Cordes wrote:
On 29 Oct, Sean Walberg wrote:
I don't think it's public knowledge. Gilbert announced it a few years ago at a meeting when he was talking about how he was rate limiting FTP to appease the UofM bandwidth police.
Ah, if it's not a secret, best to put the info on the web site. If it is a secret, let's hope the enemy doesn't read the roundtable!
Well, that was true at one time, as Sean suggests, but isn't anymore. We used to rate-limit our FTP connections on a per-connection basis, in addition to having overall limits for each type of connection (FTP, HTTP, and RSYNC). The problem was that we couldn't rate-limit HTTP and RSYNC on a per-connection basis, which meant that as soon as the word would spread, those services would get swamped too. Since we couldn't reliably differentiate between local (within Manitoba) and foreign traffic, this would have lead to a reduction in available bandwidth for MUUG members.
However, we removed the local rate limiting when the campus networking people added a packet shaper to the commercial Internet pipe for the whole University. Since this shaper does rate limiting on a per-flow basis, we didn't need the local limits anymore. As a result, we no longer have to be secretive about the general availability of HTTP and RSYNC access to our mirror space either.
So, yes, we _should_ probably update the web site to indicate this at some point. Up until now, we've just made the information available to the Fedora Project, who publishes it on their official mirror list...
http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/mirrors.html#NA
I guess the reason for not listing this on our own web site has been a combination of inertia, and not knowing exactly which services and directories are worth listing (since we mirror a few things other than Fedora). Also, for FTP, there's one top-level directory that we can point to. For technical reasons, that's not the case for HTTP. (RSYNC doesn't have one top-level directory either, but you can query the server for a list of available share names.)