Re: Pointing ftp.gnome.org somewhere (Re: master.gnome.org and FTP server restructurement)

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Tomas Ogren <stric ing umu se> writes:

> On 08 March, 2001 - Martin Baulig sent me these 1.6K bytes:
> 
> > Hi guys,
> 
> Heya.
> 
> > when we disabled anonftp on ftp.gnome.org a while ago,
> > everything which was not somewhere below /pub/GNOME/ has
> > become unaccessible since our mirrors didn't pick this up.
> 
> After discussing the matter with ftp.gnome.org == master.gnome.org and
> anonftp being disabled with Martin on irc, we came to the conclusion
> that a possible solution is to point ftp.gnome.org at ftp.acc.umu.se
> (which is ftp.se.debian.org right now too) in Umeå, Sweden.
> 
> Our machine is currently pushing out ~23GB/day
> (http://www.acc.umu.se/technical/statistics/ftp/index.html.en) and
> according to some logs sent by Martin, ftp.gnome.org took ~3GB/day, so
> that shouldn't be a problem for us. Disk space isn't that much a problem
> either, we are mirroring entire debian, debian-non-US, debian-iso
> (official as well as unofficial sid & woody), CPAN and some more.
> 
> Our connection is 100MBit to the Swedish University Network which is
> part of NorduNET which has pretty good connectivity. (7x155 to
> Teleglobe, 2x155 to Ebone and 1x155 to Internet2.. or so)
> 
> I am syncing over the data right now so we can set it up as a mirror to
> start with.
 
Hmmm, I'm pretty sure a majority of our traffic is currently
from North America.

Now, from a performance point of view, this isn't a very big
problem. Quick test revealed sunstained FTP transfer rates
of:

 ftp.gnome.org        530 kb/sec  (No anonftp users, 5 miles down the road, 8 hops)
 ftp.kernel.org       330 kb/sec
 ftp.umu.acc.se       230 kb/sec
 ftp.redhat.com      ~100 kb/sec  (no this isn't on my local network)
 ftp.sourceforge.net ~100 kb/sec

So, quite decent transfer rates from North America. 

But from a good-network-citizen point of view, if most of our traffic
is from North America, it seems that we probably should try to have
ftp.gnome.org in North America.

I think the first thing we need to do is to make sure all 
interested mirrors have the current rsync password and are rsyncing,
and we have their contact addresses.

Then we'll be better in a better position to evaluate

 - How much spare bandwidth we have at the main gnome.org site
 - Whether there are interested mirrors in North America with
   comparable connectivity.

But certainly we appreciate the offer, and probably should
at least make umu.acc.se ftp.eu.gnome.org.

Regards,
                                        Owen