I was being generally unhappy with the Mirror Admins of the two external Fedora Mirrors in India and we collectively stumbled upon the eureka moment that we don't have straight answer to "why an university or any academic institution with a reasonable connection would like to have a Fedora Mirror, internally, if not externally"
Given the low number of torrent seeds and the increasing usage of rawhide bits for the OS, it becomes important to [i] have more mirrors [ii] more torrent seeds and [iii] more media via FreeMedia available.
mether would perhaps like to write about [iii] separately later. This mail is more about the question - what would be a compelling reason for an institution to have a Fedora mirror ?
On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 12:51 PM, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay foss.mailinglists@gmail.com wrote:
mether would perhaps like to write about [iii] separately later. This mail is more about the question - what would be a compelling reason for an institution to have a Fedora mirror ?
It is a much better idea to have a local mirror, than to let a vast horde of people download the same file again and again. Of course those institutions that use proxy can cache the iso images. But that is only the beginning. If X is a version of a distro ... then the installs are bound to get bigger over time in various patterns.
Every University must have a basic commitment towards the intellectual, economic and social welfare of the society and that is the more compelling reason. The institution in question needs to do little here, but the possible benefits are substantial.
Best
A. Mani
Mani A wrote:
Every University must have a basic commitment towards the intellectual, economic and social welfare of the society and that is the more compelling reason. The institution in question needs to do little here, but the possible benefits are substantial.
That said it makes it easier to attack problems if some particular points are discussed and investigated. The underlying problem is that we do need to make one big push towards getting more mirrors, even if they are internal at the beginning and getting more seeders for the torrents
Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote:
I was being generally unhappy with the Mirror Admins of the two external Fedora Mirrors in India and we collectively stumbled upon the eureka moment that we don't have straight answer to "why an university or any academic institution with a reasonable connection would like to have a Fedora Mirror, internally, if not externally"
Given the low number of torrent seeds and the increasing usage of rawhide bits for the OS, it becomes important to [i] have more mirrors [ii] more torrent seeds and [iii] more media via FreeMedia available.
mether would perhaps like to write about [iii] separately later. This mail is more about the question - what would be a compelling reason for an institution to have a Fedora mirror ?
{Will post the free media details later]
Atleast in some of the universities, being affiliated with major free and open source software projects is very beneficial within the educational environment considering the long standing history of such establishments to Unix/Unix like systems. They would encourage more usage, experimentation and more informal relationships that can lead to short term projects (Google SoC, Internships), hires for the skill set based on practical projects instead of getting permanently struck in the fresher - no experience - no hire loop. IIT's have continued to bang on this very successfully and other smart colleges have adopted this model too. One particular point I heard from mirror admins is that a six month release cycle + fast updates can be problematic due to bandwidth limitations.
For the couple of official mirrors within India, they don't actually meet the stated requirements and have been given exceptions since having a bandwidth capped mirror is better than no mirror at all but as a consequence of this, they almost always time our/reject connections for yum updates. We probably to need to again get in touch with IIT folks and see if we can make progress on getting their internal/public mirror listed. Note that mirror manager has a feature where a private mirror can be listed but hidden which allows all the internal users to be automatically redirected to the local mirror instead of the public ones which is a pretty nifty thing to do.
Rahul
We probably to need to again get in touch with IIT folks and see if we can make progress on getting their internal/public mirror listed.
If I remember correctly, you were talking to IITM in this regard. Is there any update on that?
If I remember correctly, you were talking to IITM in this regard. Is there any update on that?
I meant IITC, sorry for the mistake.
Hi Guys
I have been trying to talk to NIXI about hosting Linux mirrors in India. Working through the babudom is taking a lot of time, though.
Meanwhile, I host Fedora mirrors on a few servers I maintain here and there. None of these have more than 2Mbps connectivity, which might not be great, but is still good by India standards. Would it be useful to have these added to the official Fedora Mirror list? We have no connection limits or other such jazz. We just prioritise the SMTP and IMAP traffic on these servers over the FTP traffic, so no one in management complains about the mirror traffic.
Your thoughts please...
-Saurabh
I have been trying to talk to NIXI about hosting Linux mirrors in India. Working through the babudom is taking a lot of time, though.
Meanwhile, I host Fedora mirrors on a few servers I maintain here and there. None of these have more than 2Mbps connectivity, which might not be great, but is still good by India standards. Would it be useful to have these added to the official Fedora Mirror list?
That will be too nice. :)
We have no connection limits or other such jazz. We just prioritise the SMTP and IMAP traffic on these servers over the FTP traffic, so no one in management complains about the mirror traffic.
Once you are listed, you will need to have that restriction!!! Otherwise you won't be able to open even a single web page, let alone SMTP. (You will find it out yourself. You need not believe me :)) We generally get ~65000 hits a day and over 35 Gbs of transfer even with the restriction. ;)
Still if we have many mirrors, we can overcome this problem as the load will be shared.
Your thoughts please...
-Saurabh
susmit shannigrahi wrote:
Once you are listed, you will need to have that restriction!!! Otherwise you won't be able to open even a single web page, let alone SMTP. (You will find it out yourself. You need not believe me :)) We generally get ~65000 hits a day and over 35 Gbs of transfer even with the restriction. ;)
and we are all waiting for that post from you on your experiences pertaining to giving tender loving care to the WBUT mirror :)
Once you are listed, you will need to have that restriction!!! Otherwise you won't be able to open even a single web page, let alone SMTP. (You will find it out yourself. You need not believe me :)) We generally get ~65000 hits a day and over 35 Gbs of transfer even with the restriction. ;)
There is another thing I forgot to mention, Suppose you don't restrict your traffic, and you have 256 httpd connection,(default for apache). So for each user, you assign (theoretically) 2048Kbps/256 = 8 Kbps. Practically it will be still less :(. So that will slow down the whole update system of fedora.
This is exactly why we had to limit our connection. :(
Saurabh Jain (सौरभ जैन) wrote:
Hi Guys
I have been trying to talk to NIXI about hosting Linux mirrors in India. Working through the babudom is taking a lot of time, though.
Please keep following up. We are in real need for more mirrors as we are close to the Fedora 9 release. Some traffic details are at
Meanwhile, I host Fedora mirrors on a few servers I maintain here and there. None of these have more than 2Mbps connectivity, which might not be great, but is still good by India standards. Would it be useful to have these added to the official Fedora Mirror list? We have no connection limits or other such jazz. We just prioritise the SMTP and IMAP traffic on these servers over the FTP traffic, so no one in management complains about the mirror traffic.
Your thoughts please...
I am CC'ing our mirror admin, Matt Domsch who you can get in touch with offlist and provide you more details. Some information at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Mirroring
Ignore the bandwidth requirements and follow the other instructions. Like I said, we have added the Indian mirrors despite not meeting our bandwidth requirements since it does to help to share the load.
Rahul
On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 10:54 AM, Rahul Sundaram sundaram@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Saurabh Jain (सौरभ जैन) wrote:
Hi Guys
I have been trying to talk to NIXI about hosting Linux mirrors in India. Working through the babudom is taking a lot of time, though.
Please keep following up. We are in real need for more mirrors as we are close to the Fedora 9 release. Some traffic details are at
It will also help if more detailed instructions on using p2p are provided in appropriate pages. Even adsl users can maintain better ratios.
Immediately after release, many Linux distros can be downloaded @ 1.2 -1.6 Mbps by torrent (on a 2Mbps connection), while that may fall to a paltry .2 Mbps by direct download. There are exceptions to the latter aspect.
Best
A. Mani
Rahul Sundaram wrote:
That was during the last release. That petered out with no real results. We are going to try again.
IIT Chennai / Madras is an option, IIT Mumbai is another (and they do have an internal mirror about which nothing much gets talked about). There are a lot of private institutes which seem to be taking a deep interest in producing Free / Open Source Software - would be nice to start getting folks from there on this list.
An internal mirror is a good thing to begin with. The underlying idea over here is to figure out how to get the os bits to people primarily to use and as an added benefit to contribute.
So, for example, I know of a person at Madhyamgram who syncs repos nearly daily and provides installation and related support to a lot of students nearby.
IIT Chennai / Madras is an option
IITM has always had a pubic mirror. Here it is:
ftp://ftp.iitm.ac.in/fedora/
Don't know if they want to have it listed in the public mirrors. Five years back when I was at IITM, we wanted to be publicly listed, but there was no Fedora or mirror concept at RedHat.
-
A. Mani -
Rahul Sundaram -
sankarshan -
Saurabh Jain (सौरभ जैन) -
susmit shannigrahi