Hi Yedidyah,
Am 03.10.2010 um 12:51 schrieb mirrormaster@isoc.org.il:
Speaking for mirror.isoc.org.il:
[...]
I'd like to ask a question which is somewhat specific to us, but might
also be relevant to others:
We have a fast link inside Israel, but slow outside, including Asia
(to which we belong). I now looked a bit at mirrorbrain's docs (which
seems very cool, BTW), and it seems that it should be possible for
mirror admins to control/tune such things, but I could not find out
how. Is it? If so, how? If not - can the master be configured to e.g.
point all Israeli users to us (at least until other Israeli mirrors
appear) but point outside (doesn't really matter if from Asia, our
links
are actually to Europe IIRC) users to us only with a low probability,
or
something like that?
Thanks for asking.
There is configuration in place that takes care of this situation.
Unfortunately, it's not possible so far to make this configuration
accessible to you, but I'm very happy about every input that I can get
to do such fine-tuning. Making the configuration available for tweaking
would definitely be possible, but it costs time because it requires
writing some kind of interface (e.g. web), for which I completely lack
the time, unfortunately, because I have only my private spare time to
offer.
The specific configuration regarding Israel is two-fold.
First, I know that your mirror has slow outside link, so I made sure
that your mirror gets only requests from users whose IP addresses
resolve to Israel by GeoIP, or are from the same autonomous system as
your mirror, or from the same network prefix. We will not send you
requests from clients whose IP address resolves to a different country.
Internally, this is done with a flag set for your mirror called
"country_only".
Second, there is configuration for Isreali users that kicks in when your
mirror is not online, or when any file is requested that is not present
on your mirror. I have configured two big German mirrors to receive such
requests. Thereby, users from Israel will automatically be sent to them,
and not to one of the Asian mirrors (which are suboptimal because Asia
is a vast area, where a region grouping doesn't really make sense).
Internally, this is achieved with a setting called "other_countries"
which I set for these two German mirrors, as shown below; you can see
that they are also used as reserve mirror for many other countries -
most of Africa, Baltic states, and others.
mb list --other-countries | grep '\<il\>'
halifax.rwth-aachen.de dk,pl il,tr,vn
ao,bf,bi,bj,bv,cd,cf,cg,ci,cm,cv,dj,dz,eg,eh,er,et,ga,gh,gm,gn,gq,gw,hm,ke
,km,lr,ly,ma,mg,ml,mr,mu,mw,mz,ne,ng,re,rw,sc,sd,sh,sl,sn,so,st,td,tf,tg,t
n,tz,ug,yt,za,zm,zw a2 ge,kz,ru in
ftp5.gwdg.de dk,pl il,tr,vn
ao,bf,bi,bj,bv,cd,cf,cg,ci,cm,cv,dj,dz,eg,eh,er,et,ga,gh,gm,gn,gq,gw,hm,ke
,km,lr,ly,ma,mg,ml,mr,mu,mw,mz,ne,ng,re,rw,sc,sd,sh,sl,sn,so,st,td,tf,tg,t
n,tz,ug,yt,za,zm,zw a2 ge,kz,ru in
The assumption is (backed by anecdotic evidence) that German mirrors are
reasonably reachable for most countries, while neighbouring countries
can be hard to reach.