Re: GNU mirror going away

[mike808@users.sourceforge.net]

> Have you ever mirrored a site via FTP?  There are absolutely no
> guarantees that your copy of the data even remotely resembles what is
> on the server.  That's one of the reasons why rsync is essential if
> you want a real mirror.

OK. I'm confusing work (where I deal with a real FTP server that *does*
guarantee transfers) with the FTP servers everyone else deals with.
And yes, I'm aware of FTP's deficiencies WRT integrity guarantees at the
application layer, although it's very unlikely something wouldn't be flagged at
either the TCP/IP layer, the FTP block layer, or the SSL layer. Did I say SSL?
Oops. Non-RFC2228 FTP servers need not listen to that part.

But don't most of those "master" sites also provide either signatures or MD5
digests for their files? You know, like Debian does? Don't the mirror scripts
implement those checks? If not, maybe we can help, since you're so overloaded
with all this mirror maintenance.

> Mirroring via HTTP is only slightly more reliable, and that's only
> because apache isn't as buggy as the million different FTP servers out
> there, but it is still a hack.  (Parsing HTML for a file list is a
> little silly, don't you think?)

The server I work with does this as well. FTP, HTTP it's all the same to it.
HTTP is a bit better with being able to do byte-ranging in the requests.
I need to get out more ...

BTW, I'd be glad to give a presentation on any of this stuff if folks are
interested.

> Besides that, I'd be real surprised if most of the other GNU mirrors
> aren't exactly where I'm at...  Suddenly cut off, without a reliable
> way to mirror.

You really should be venting that towards GNU, not by "picking up your toys 
and going home" for the users of the mirror.

Perhaps you could suggest something proactive for all of us LUCI or SILUG
members could do in order to help the GNU folks understand the negative
implications of their decision to drop RSYNC support.

Mike/

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