launchpad could know about official country mirror status

We are considering making some mirror improvements after July. I think this is a good candidate and a strong reason to do them.

This is a problem for us right now. We've repeatedly asked to get back br.{archive,releases}.ubuntu.com but canonical ignores us. About 95% of our ubuntu traffic is for users in the country; now they're are directed to canonical, with a *much* lower bandwidth. So this dns problem is affecting a large comunity, and will be particularly bad at release time. Therefore I ask that the importance be raised.

This feature is not in the focus of the current development cycle. Community members are welcome to working this and the Launchpad team are willing to help plan the feature.

Hello Carlos,

Your ticket (ref: Ubuntu RT #8042) for restoring br.[a,r].u.c was submitted 12 hours ago and shall dealt with as soon as possible. The reason your mirror was taking out of DNS was because you were having DNS issues over the weekend. We'll get this done for you as soon as possible.

Jonathan

Database schema changes need for this feature have been done on lp:~jpds/launchpad/fix_361650_schema_changes .

Curtis Hovey (<email address hidden>) wrote on 24 March 2010 18:57:
 >** Changed in: launchpad-registry
 > Milestone: 10.03 => 10.04
 >
 >--
 >launchpad could know about official country mirror status
 >https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/361650
 >You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
 >of the bug.
 >
 >Status in The Launchpad Registry: In Progress
 >
 >Bug description:
 >When the owners of a particular mirror request it, we will point DNS entries at their mirrors so they are official country mirrors (e.g. fr.archive.ubuntu.com, de.releases.ubuntu.com, etc.)
 >
 >Currently, if one of these mirrors degrades or fails, we are reliant on user reports informing us, so we can revert the DNS back to the main archive/releases machines.
 >
 >If Launchpad's mirror registry was able to indicate that particular mirrors are official country mirrors (and it could potentially be the case that a mirror carries more than one country's DNS entries), the mirror prober would be able to inform us of mirrors that should be disabled in DNS.

Automatic disabling of official country mirrors is dangerous because
the prober may *erroneously* think that a mirror is unavailable.

One example of misjudment happens when the international link between
the prober in Europe and the mirror fails. However the mirror may
still be accessible to national users. Since the majority of the
mirror users is usually from the same country, the mirror will be
performing its function pretty well even if it's inaccessible from the
prober in Europe. If you cut the country mirror out and send users to
another one, you'll just harm the users by telling them to go to a
usually slower site. Particularly if you point them to the main
machines in London.

It's better to let users tell you about unavailable mirrors than
trying to discover it from a single prober. You can minimize the risk
of keeping an unavailable mirror in the official country list by
assigning them only to reputable sites.

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 09:10:30PM -0000, Carlos Carvalho wrote:
> Automatic disabling of official country mirrors is dangerous because
> the prober may *erroneously* think that a mirror is unavailable.
>
> One example of misjudment happens when the international link between
> the prober in Europe and the mirror fails. However the mirror may
> still be accessible to national users. Since the majority of the
> mirror users is usually from the same country, the mirror will be
> performing its function pretty well even if it's inaccessible from the
> prober in Europe. If you cut the country mirror out and send users to
> another one, you'll just harm the users by telling them to go to a
> usually slower site. Particularly if you point them to the main
> machines in London.

+1. Although you might wonder how well a .ubuntu.com hostname will work
if the mirror has broken international connectivity. But than again,
it's not very probable that the whole country lost international
connectivity..

I'd say, give a good warning to mirror-admins that a country mirror
*seems* down, and let the takedown be done manually. (Save you the
communication with dns zones as well)

--
Mark Schouten <email address hidden>

> Automatic disabling of official country mirrors is dangerous because
> the prober may *erroneously* think that a mirror is unavailable.

There will be no auto-disabling of country DNS mirrors via Launchpad. This is purely about tracking which mirrors are such on Launchpad and providing a UI for it.

Fixed in stable r10619 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/10619>

Fixed released in launchpad-project 10.04.