Hi,
Maybe this already supported in some way or another, or been discussed
in the past but let me picture the problem first.
Currently mirrors that offer rsync support have their own filesystem
layout and a path used on one rsync server would be different to the path
on another rsync server.
Additionally, rsync is restricted to the IP it is listening on. And if you
would want to have a second rsync server, you basicly need a second IP.
Now, the CentOS project makes use of different public mirrors to
distribute their binaries and they use a geo-ip system to automatically
point clients to different servers to spread the load. This works well for
HTTP, but for rsync it would not work consistently except if they can
re-organize the path-structure of public mirrors (or have a dedicated
rsync server or CentOS that follows the pth structure we lay out).
Vhost support (much like HTTP 1.1) inside the rsync protocol would allow
an administrator to set up different views or different filesystem
structures for different hostnames to accomodate the universal location
that clients would use.
Much like:
http://mirrors.centos.org/centos/4/updates/i386/RPMS/
currently points on each server to the same location, we could have a:
rsync://mirrors.centos.org/centos/4/updates/i386/RPMS/
I'm interested to know what the rsync developers think of this idea. How
big a change it would be overall and at what timeframe (given there would
be extensive development and testing) it could be included, if at all.
Thanks !
-- dag wieers, dag@wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]
