Hi all,
When 7.1-RELEASE came out, FreeBSD Update was overwhelmed by the burst of
traffic as thousands of people tried to upgrade at once. I'd like to make
sure
this doesn't happen again, so I'm looking for some extra temporary
mirror
capacity.
If you can provide me with
(a) 40 GB of disk space,
(b) 1 TB of bandwidth (I expect 10+ Mbps for the first few days after the
release announcement),
(c) an HTTP server (or root/jail access so that I can install one myself), and
(d) a firewall rule which blocks outgoing RST packets,
for the month of May (depending on when the release happens, I might not need
these extra mirrors beyond the middle of the month), please contact me. Extra
points if you have a fast disk subsystem, since FreeBSD Update involves serving
up lots of small files, and it has been disk seek limited in the past.
The requirement (d) results from a bug in phttpget which (I think) caused a lot
of failed attempts to upgrade systems to 7.1-RELEASE; I've fixed this bug
now,
but people upgrading from old releases will still have the buggy phttpget, so
for now it's necessary to work around the bug by making sure that RSTs
don't get
sent (the buggy phttpget dies if a connection is reset instead of retrying it
properly).
Since I'm sure people will ask: I'm not looking for extra permanent
mirrors at
the moment. The FreeBSD Update mirroring code currently consists of "Colin
sshes into servers and copies bits around from the shell", so until
I've made
some improvements to that I don't really want to have any more mirrors than
necessary.
--
Colin Percival
Security Officer, FreeBSD | freebsd.org | The power to serve
Founder / author, Tarsnap | tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid