[RndTbl] Fedora mirror useless for yum

Gilbert E. Detillieux gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca
Tue Oct 31 17:01:29 CST 2006


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.)

-- 
Gilbert E. Detillieux		E-mail:	<gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca>
Dept. of Computer Science	Web:	http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/
University of Manitoba		Phone:	(204)474-8161
Winnipeg MB CANADA  R3T 2N2	Fax:	(204)474-7609



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