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#1 2007-05-18 15:32:41

fiod
Member
Registered: 2007-04-02
Posts: 205

Painful point - and a solution

Hey,

One thing that disturbs me about arch (and wasn't that troubling on other distros) is that it doesn't have
a good mirror system.

I myself live in Israel, and need to use mirrors far away from me (like ones in Germany, Greece, etc.).

I thought of something a bit revolutionary:

Why don't we build a system which will work something like the bittorrents system, and will allow
all ARCH users to share their bandwidth to spread all new pacman packages, thus allowing the ultimate mirror system?

All bittorrents transactions are based on a similar system, so it might be easy to build based on this system (bittorrent)..

Just a suggestion, what do you thing?

fiod

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#2 2007-05-18 16:41:15

mucknert
Member
From: Berlin // Germany
Registered: 2006-06-27
Posts: 510

Re: Painful point - and a solution

I have a better idea which can be realized more easily: start your own Arch-Mirror! wink


Todays mistakes are tomorrows catastrophes.

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#3 2007-05-18 18:14:39

Xilon
Member
Registered: 2007-01-01
Posts: 243

Re: Painful point - and a solution

I recall phrakture saying that he is planning to implement some sort of system like bittorrent (don't quote me on that, it's late in the morning).
Currently there are metalink files available for packages I think, so you can try use that, though I think that only allows you to download from multiple servers and once - I don't know.

Bittorrent might be slower than the archlinux repos unless the "http seed" feature is implemented where the current mirrors would be permanent seeders, but only used if there aren't enough seeders.

Either way I'm for the idea, so that it's at least an option smile

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#4 2007-05-19 02:01:42

neotuli
Lazy Developer
From: London, UK
Registered: 2004-07-06
Posts: 1,204
Website

Re: Painful point - and a solution

someone already implemented something like this by writing their own program and setting ftpagent to use it. I don't quite remember how it worked or how well it worked though (it may have just been a quick proof-of-concept). Try searching the forums a bit.


The suggestion box only accepts patches.

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#5 2007-06-08 17:41:18

twanj
Member
From: Pompano Beach, FL
Registered: 2006-08-02
Posts: 47
Website

Re: Painful point - and a solution

Xilon wrote:

Currently there are metalink files available for packages I think, so you can try use that, though I think that only allows you to download from multiple servers and once - I don't know.

Bittorrent might be slower than the archlinux repos unless the "http seed" feature is implemented where the current mirrors would be permanent seeders, but only used if there aren't enough seeders.

Either way I'm for the idea, so that it's at least an option smile

The original poster might want to try http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fas … _Downloads or http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=25611 (this one creates metalinks for packages, I don't think they're already available anywhere, but that would be easy enough to fix).

Right now, the metalinks only list all the mirrors, but they can list bittorrent as well and then use the mirrors (pretty much http seeding).

The next version of aria2 should be pretty cool, you can download multiple packages at once...which should show a decent speed increase depending on your connection.


Simpler/Faster downloads with error recovery - http://www.metalinker.org/

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