Mirrors list

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 23, 2013, at 15:42, Timothy Hart wrote:

> Is the list of mirrors fairly stable? I'm referring to the contents of the file at 
> 
> rsync.macports.org/release/tarballs/ports/_resources/port1.0/fetch/mirror_sites.tcl
> and
> rsync.macports.org/release/tarballs/ports/_resources/port1.0/fetch/archive_sites.tcl
> 
> I understand each port maintainer may change or modify their list of mirrors at any time. I'm interested in knowing how frequently that happens historically - and in aggregate.

mirror_sites change often. But most ports list individual master_sites and do not use the mirror_sites list. So attempting to whitelist all the domains ports may fetch from is virtually impossible.

The archive_sites list is very stable.


> Why?
> I have an issue in my organization where our DNS servers are configured to 'helpfully' give an IP address back for every query. In cases where the host is actually not known, the IP address is configured to perform a search and respond with an HTML page. As a result macports installs can fail when the first mirror site is not found.

Yes. We have a wiki page detailing this problem:

https://trac.macports.org/wiki/MisbehavingServers


> The network group is willing to consider white-listing macports mirror sites for us as a solution. I want to make sure that maintaining a whitelist of (currently over 300) mirrors won't turn into a maintenance headache.

DNS that returns a result when no result should be return is broken and needs to be fixed by your system administrators. No other valid interpretation of the relevant specifications exists.