Updates from the GNOME Sysadmin Team: New Mirroring service, Owncloud 6

[Andrea Veri <av gnome org>]

Howdy,

it's time for yet another round of updates from the GNOME Sysadmin Team. This time it's not about future maintenances or outages but about our completely new mirroring service.

As you may have been aware of GNOME has a lot of mirrors around the world but we never took advantage of them and kept using our main mirror kindly served by the Academic Computer Club of the Umea University. (ftp.acc.umu.se being a CNAME to ftp.gnome.org)

Many mirrors contacted me and the team in the past asking if keeping their mirror around was worth the disk space they were using for our project given the very low amount of downloads they were receiving. (that was expected given download.gnome.org was a plain redirect to ftp.gnome.org, and thus to ftp.acc.umu.se)

I personally always answered yes, it was worth keeping the GNOME code synced in as much places in the world as possible but at the same time I felt that we needed a proper mirroring infrastructure to properly serve the downloads through all the mirrors that decided to provide disk space and bandwitdh to support our project.

Looking around and thanks to an Olav Vitter's review we decided to move forward and setup a Mirrorbrain [1] istance. You can read more about its features at [2].

After a few days spent making the EPEL packages (Thanks Patrick for the work you put on reviewing and accepting them!), configuring and tweaking, our istance is finally live at [3]. As you will see we have plenty of mirrors based in EU and just one in the US and Asia. I'll be contacting a few mirrors in those zones and eventually welcome them as new GNOME mirrors so we can have our downloads served in the fastest way possible even in remote regions like Australia, Asia and the US itself. (if anyone knows someone interested in mirroring GNOME sources, please redirect the request to support gnome org)

Gving a look at a new indexing table we've introduced on the file indexes of our main mirror can be a good way to get started to how Mirrorbrain works behind the scenes. [4] Obviously all the links that existed before Mirrorbrain are still working just fine but the great difference are them now being served through Mirrorbrain (which then redirects the user to the closest mirror through mod_geoip) itself and SSL. Another good way of testing the whole setup out is by using curl, this way: 'curl -iS https://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-terminal/3.11/gnome-terminal-3.11.0.tar.xz.mirrorlist'

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Owncloud release 6

The other update I wanted to report is our Owncloud istance [5] being upgraded to the very latest release being Owncloud 6. As usual please redirect account requests to me or to support gnome org directly as explained at [6].

[1] http://mirrorbrain.org/

[2] http://mirrorbrain.org/features/

[3] https://download.gnome.org/

[4] https://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-terminal/3.11/gnome-terminal-3.11.0.tar.xz.mirrorlist

[5] http://cloud.gnome.org/

[6] https://wiki.gnome.org/Sysadmin/Owncloud

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Cheers,

Andrea

Debian Developer,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Sysadmin,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av