WWW Mirrors

[Ken Smith]

It looks like I'll be coordinating the www mirror sites too.  I have
checked with www@ and they don't seem interested.  The doc@ folks
seemed pleased when I tried to process the addition for Greece that
came along recently.  This message is mostly me fishing for more
background that you folks might have noticed flow through this list or
have seen elsewhere.  Unless you think something warrants discussion
if you want to point anything out to me just send personal email
please.  I don't think many of you will care about this but some of
you might notice me about to make a mistake I'd regret later. :-)

As far as I can tell the only place that the www mirrors are mentioned
at all is the pull-down list on the top-level page of the freebsd.org
Web site itself.  It doesn't seem like it's following any particular
standard for how things are laid out - some sections map www3 to USA/3
for example but other sections don't.  The USA listing actually mixes
in sites not in the USA.  There are hosts listed that are not in
freebsd.org namespace, etc...

So, I'm going to continue to allow www mirror sites that aren't
registered in freebsd.org.  I'll condense the listed sites at some
point, I don't think the tag that's given to them in the pull-down
list has any relevance to the users at all other than an indication of
what country it's in (by condense I mean, for example, change the
label on "Denmark/3" to "Denmark/2" - no point in having a gap).  The
users will care about the DNS names because if they bookmark a site it
will be the DNS name that gets recorded so I won't monkey around with
those and will try to make sure once a DNS name does exist we have
something that responds to that name.  As we shift over to having
"us.freebsd.org" instead of the TLD being for the United States I'll
continue to have sites in the TLD because of the bookmark issue but I
won't "advertise" them in that pull-down list.  Sites in the list
tagged as USA/something will be in us.freebsd.org.  For the FTP sites
we'll be using the TLD as a hint the sites are Primary but I don't
think there is a need for something like that among the www sites.
I'll work with the Zone Admins at the point a site seems to go bad.
I'd sort of prefer the pull-down list only contain unique mappings to
sites so it stays a reasonable size but we can work that out on a
case-by-case basis.  The Zone Admins should probably adjust the DNS
entries to point the bad site at an existing good site because of the
user bookmarks issue.

And I'll start recording site contact info at the point I add them
in.  As far as I can tell nobody did that before.

-- 
						Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |