[manjaro-mirrors] Fwd: Updates regarding ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de

[Philip Müller]

Subject: Updates regarding ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2016 14:15:16 +0100
From: Carsten Otto <otto at informatik.rwth-aachen.de>
Reply-To: FTP <ftp at halifax.rwth-aachen.de>
To: FTP <ftp at halifax.rwth-aachen.de>

Dear mirror admins,

I'm an administrator of ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de, and your project is
mirrored by us. You can always reach us at ftp at halifax.rwth-aachen.de
(see To: and Reply-To: of this mail) and find more information on our
website at http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/.

There are some recent changes regarding our mirror, and at least some of
those need your attention. I kindly ask you to check (and reply to) the
following points. I tried to order these by importance, with the more
important ones at the top. This is the only mail of this kind we sent
around in the past few years - we hope this frequency is OK for you :)

We understand that some items are not relevant to some projects, and
that there may be dedicated websites to implement specific changes. We
tried to consider this in advance. Please excuse us for this mail, as
we'd like to make sure we did not forget anything. With more than 50
projects to mirror on our server, sadly mistakes happen. Furthermore,
you know your own setup and requirements far better than we do.

Thank you for your time!

[IPv6]
We added IPv6 support: ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de now resolves
to 137.226.34.46 and 2a00:8a60:e012:a00::21. Please update your
documentation, firewall/whitelist settings, and project DNS records
accordingly. For DNS entries we prefer a CNAME to our host.

[IPv4]
We switched our IPv4 address. The old address 137.226.34.42 is not in
use anymore. The new address, as seen via DNS, is 137.226.34.46. Please
update your documentation, firewall/whitelist settings, and project DNS
records accordingly. For DNS entries we prefer a CNAME to our host.

[project review]
We'd appreciate if you could check if your own project is mirrored as
intended. We offer http/ftp/rsync for all projects. Please also consider
how often we should run rsync against your mirror, and if we are using a
valid upstream server. This information is available at
http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/.

[pushes]
If possible, we'd like to be notified about updates to your repository,
instead of frequently checking via rsync. If sending SSH-triggers or
directly uploading the data via rsync is a valid option for your
project, please get into touch with us.

[documentation update]
We recently upgraded our hardware, and now serve data with up to 20
GBit/sec. Also, if you provide a textual descriptions of the mirror or
its sponsor, "RWTH Aachen University" and possibly a link to
https://www.rwth-aachen.de/ is preferred. Please update your
documentation, if applicable.

[bandwidth]
We currently serve data with about 1,5 GBit/sec on average, and would
like to put our connection of 20 GBit/sec to more use.  If you can tweak
your rediction settings, introduce an automated redirector, mention us
in a more prominant place, feel free to do so. Also, if you know about
any other project we might want to mirror, feel free to contact us.
You can check the bandwidth used for your project using the following
links. The shown "diff" number gives the average bandwidth per second,
defined by computing the difference of incoming synchronization data
(negative) and user facing uploads (positive). This number should
ideally be several MBit/sec for each project:
http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/~cotto/loganalyzer/index_day.html
http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/~cotto/loganalyzer/index_week.html
http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/~cotto/loganalyzer/index_month.html
http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/~cotto/loganalyzer/index_year.html
(starting with the new hardware setup at the end of 2015)

[rsync configuration]
Sometimes it happens that we encounter errors like the following:
  rsync: send_files failed to open "/path/file.name.G3ed8i" (in module):
Permission denied (13)
Our mirror script (archvsync from Debian) automatically excludes
directories named ".~tmp~". These are used when running rsync with the
"--delay-updates" option. Please evaluate if this option would be
suitable for your project, so that downstream mirrors like ours have
less troubles.

[permission issues]
In some projects we sometimes observe permission problems, possibly
staying unresolved over several days. We kindly ask you to take care
that such permission errors do not happen, and that you monitor your own
rsync server for such errors. While we quickly notice such errors, with
more than 50 mirrored projects we're not exactly looking forward to this
kind of additional work.

PS: A short response, even if you have no questions, is highly
appreciated.

Thank you very much,
Carsten
-- 
Dr. Carsten Otto
http://verify.rwth-aachen.de/otto/