On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 05:58:03PM -0600, Dax Kelson wrote:
I mentioned on the list a few months back a technique for having YUM automatically use a local mirror without any configuration changes on the clients. A few people sent me emails asking for more details, so I was goaded/spurred into implementing it and have now documented the procedure in a new GURU GUIDE.
Dax, very cool. Thanks for posting this.
One thing I added to mirrormanager[1] was the ability for a mirror host to specify the set of IP netblocks that should use the local mirror. When a yum client hits the mirrorlist CGI, such as:
http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=core-6&arch=i386
it looks up the client IP address in mirrormanager's database. If one or more of the hosts in that database claim that IP address as "local" to them, the CGI returns just those hosts.
In mirrormanager, you can have private mirror sites and private mirror hosts, so they never appear on the public list of servers, but the mirrorlist CGI can still handle them. The drawback is that mirrormanager can't crawl private mirror sites (generally). So, you have to use mirrormanager's report_mirror script[2], which runs on your private mirror, to tell the mirrormanager database what content you have. With this little bit of setup, you can get much the same benefit as your setup provides.
Some ISPs are already using this to direct their clients at their local mirrors, which reduces their bandwidth costs, without needing to make DNS changes that affect their clients.
Thanks, Matt
[1] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager [2] http://git.fedoraproject.org/?p=hosted/mirrormanager;a=tree;f=client;h=f7b9b...