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Summary

Migrate mirror management to MirrorBrain and start generating metalinks for DNF to use for intelligent mirror selection.

Owner

  • Name: Neal Gompa
  • Email: ngompa13@gmail.com

Resources

This will require efforts by the Mageia sysadmins to migrate our mirror database into MirrorBrain and convert the existing Yum-style mirrorlist endpoint to a MirrorBrain managed one, as well as introduce a new endpoint for getting the metalink for DNF and PackageKit.

The urpmi and installer developers will need to change the configuration of urpmi to use the MirrorBrain-managed auto-redirector URL, and the packager of mageia-repos will need to change the repo files to use the metalink for DNF and PackageKit to use.

The web team and the sysadmin team will need to migrate the web downloads for ISOs to MirrorBrain as well.

Current status

  • Targeted release: Mageia 8
  • Last updated: 2020/03/03
  • Percentage of completion: 0%

Detailed Description

Per the MirrorBrain website: "MirrorBrain is an open source framework to run a content delivery network using mirror servers. It solves a challenge that many popular open source projects face - a flood of download requests, often magnitudes more than any single site could practically handle."

This change involves migrating every end point where mirror selection occurs to being managed by MirrorBrain in some fashion (web downloads, the installer, urpmi, PackageKit/DNF) to massively improve the reliability of mirror selection and availability of Mageia content.

Why it would be good for Mageia to use it

Mageia's current mirror infrastructure has been crumbling under pressure for some time now. Among other things, users get a bad experience from bad mirrors randomly downgrading or missing necessary content, causing really unexpected things to occur on their systems.

It's exponentially worse for Cauldron users, where it's a hit-or-miss affair (mostly misses) to get up to date Cauldron content, especially for users in the Americas and Asia, where we have fewer mirrors in general.

MirrorBrain improves this experience by tracking mirrors and automatically filtering the list based on content availability, preventing users from seeing bad mirrors on a regular basis. In addition, the content redirector portion automatically determines a good, up to date mirror to use based on a number of factors about your connection, which ensures that you get a good experience for downloading content directly (through web browsers or through urpmi).

Test case

  • Adding urpmi distrib media should give you MirrorBrain redirector
  • The existing yum-style mirrorlist endpoint should work as-is with MirrorBrain
  • The new metalink endpoint for rpm-md repos should work with PackageKit/DNF.

Tasks

  • Deploy and activate MirrorBrain
  • Migrate the mirror database from Mirmon to MirrorBrain
  • Migrate the Yum style mirrorlist endpoint to MirrorBrain managed mirrorlist
  • Migrate the urpmi distrib data to the MirrorBrain redirector URL (download.mageia.org or something similar)


Software / Packages Dependencies

  • MirrorBrain
    • MirrorBrain has been in Mageia for a while now, and is part of the standard repositories in Mageia 5 (which our infrastructure currently runs on)

What could disrupt development of this new feature

If the MirrorBrain deployment cannot be completed and mirror selector endpoints migrated, then this feature cannot be fully implemented.

Planning

Early inclusion into Mageia 8 would allow for good appropriation of administrator resources to roll this out and make sure everything works.

Contingency

If this fails to be ready for Mageia 8, then we fall back to our current infrastructure.

Release Notes

The release notes should indicate that Mageia now offers enhanced automatic mirror selection powered by MirrorBrain.

Documentation

Associated Bugs

Packager comments