Coordinating and distributing the release

[Scott Long]

mirror-maintainer at mirror.averse.net wrote:
> (mail was NOT cc'ed to hubs@ and re@ as the freebsd.org MX refuses to
> accept mail when my IP has no PTR record)
> 
> On Sat, 31 May 2003, Scott Long wrote:
> 
> 
>>After 5.0 we discussed ways to coordinate the release so that iso images
>>could fully propogate to the mirrors before before they were available
>>to the public.  However, I'm not sure if a decision was ever made.  Is
>>this still a reasonable goal?  Can it be done using unix file
>>permissions?  If so, how do we propagate out the file permission change
>>quickly?
> 
> 
> Would this mean that secondary mirrors (those who don't have direct access
> to one of the ftp-masters) won't be able to obtain the files too?
> 

Can we just enable <user>:archive 0770 on the files/directories and have
them safely propogate out to all of the mirrors that way, while still
leaving them invisible to normal visitors?  I certainly do not want to
exclude the secondary mirrors.

> 
>>Another idea that came to mind in talking with others is investigating
>>using BitTorrent to augment the distribution of iso images.  For those
>>not familiar, it's a distributed file sharing protocol that specializes
>>in balancing loads between every node so that everyone who is
>>downloading also contributes upload bandwidth to others.  It seems to be
>>catching on quite quickly with the linux iso people since it has a net
>>effect of reducing bandwidth load on the primary mirrors.  For those
>>that are interested, go to http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/index.html
> 
> 
> I'm open to running a btdownloader.
> 
> From what I know about about BitTorrent, the person who I upload
> to/download from is essentially randomly selected from all the people
> using a particular tracker.  This means that we wouldn't be localising
> traffic to the region of each mirror - which may or may not be a goal.
> 
> ftp.sg
> 
> 

I'm not sure if localizing traffic is good or not.  Like I said, its'
popularity is defintely growing in the linux iso area.

Scott