[52946] trunk/dports/_resources/port1.0/fetch/mirror_sites.tcl

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 28, 2009, at 13:11, David Bannister wrote:

> So yes, there is no connectivity to Telia, Comcast and a handful of  
> German ISPs.  This is due to some disagreements with AS1880 and  
> those ISPs.  AS1880, the transit provider for this node does not  
> run a public network.  It is a private network for personal use  
> with over 100Gbps of transit connectivity.  Why are you trying to  
> get ports from a Swedish mirror if you are on Comcast (Norcal)?  If  
> you are looking to avoid global connectivity issues may I suggest  
> you include GeoIP and BGP information during the selection of  
> server to make sure things 'work.'  Other people do this have have  
> no issue.  The technology exists and I will be more than happy to  
> tell you how this stuff works.

MacPorts used to not have any central mirrors, and would select a  
download location based on the order listed in the Portfile.

Then we added the mirror at Apple, and changed MacPorts to ping each  
mirror and select mirrors in order of lowest to highest ping time.  
This has seemed to work well so far.

Then the trd.no and arn.se mirrors were added, which should just  
serve to sweeten the deal. If arn.se happens to be the lowest ping,  
it will be used first. If, as Toby states, the server does not  
respond to ping from his network, then it should not impact the  
download mechanism whatsoever. If it does, then that is a bug in  
MacPorts base that we would want to address.

Using GeoIP information would be another method by which we could  
select a nearby server, but we have not written code for that. Would  
it be better than choosing lowest ping time? I personally value the  
lowest ping time mechanism, because I have several machines at home,  
each of which is running a web server and serving its distfiles, and  
each machine is configured to use the others as mirrors. This helps  
me only download a distfile from the Internet once.

I'm not familiar with how to use BGP information to select a server.