Non-Pingable Server

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 18, 2010, at 07:20, Didiet Noor wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 6:57 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Oct 18, 2010, at 02:32, Didiet Noor wrote:
>> 
>>> I've been wondering if macports can be configured for non-pingable server. There's local gnu mirror in my country (kambing.ui.ac.id) which is very fast. But since the admin closing the ICMP, Therefore, it's always timeout. How to workaround this issue?
>> 
>> I don't know. MacPorts uses ping to determine which mirror is closest to you and there is no switch to turn that off.
> 
> I don't mean of 'turning pinging' off. But another method to get nearest mirror. Maybe with HTTP GET Request? Since some servers turn off their ICMP off.

There are a number of alternate techniques we could employ. SourceForge has a good one, where all downloads go through a central redirect server which looks up the nearest mirror using Geo-IP techniques. We could do this too, we just haven't. So for MacPorts as it exists today, it uses ping times, and to turn that off you would have to modify the MacPorts base sources and recompile.