How to mirror

This document does explain a special mirror setup, please read Mirror_Infrastructure if you are interested in general informations how to mirror openSUSE data.

You do already operate a mirror and want to sync faster? You don't yet operate a mirror and want to know the requirements for becoming a mirror? Then this page is for you.

Please be advised that this page is NOT the authoritative source of information for mirror admins. If you have any questions or want to become a mirror, please contact ftpadmin@suse.com.

Mirroring faster

To ensure that people using your mirror get the best service out of it while keeping the load on your mirror low, try the following procedure:

• lower your upload speed until your kernel spends less than 20% in IOwait state so that the syncing process doesn't have to fight with downloaders for disk access
• point rsync to a local directory on the partition where your copy of the openSUSE tree should end up, but make sure that directory is not visible via ftp to avoid broken downloads for your users
• rsync only *.delta.iso from ftp.gwdg.de (approx. 200 MiB per architecture per release)
• create hardlinks in the real destination directory to the downloaded *.delta.iso files
• rsync only *.iso from ftp.gwdg.de (approx. 3.2 GiB per architecture per release)
• create hardlinks in the real destination directory to the downloaded *.iso files
• loop-mount the SUSE*i386*-CD?.iso and copy (with cp -a) their contents into the inst-source directory
• loop-mount the SUSE*x86_64*-CD?.iso and copy (with cp -a) only *x86_64.rpm into the inst-source directory
• (the inst-source directory does not contain ppc versions as of now and the noarch packages for each arch are different)
• rsync everything excluding *debuginfo*rpm from ftp.gwdg.de (this will take longer than all previous steps together)
• create hardlinks in the real destination directories for all files you have downloaded
• increase your upload speed again
• rsync everything from ftp.gwdg.de (this step is not necessary for installation from your mirror and hardly anybody downloads the debuginfo packages anyway)
• create hardlinks in the real destination directories for all files you have downloaded
• be happy that you synced your mirror in half the expected time

The advantage of the steps above are:

• your users only see the parts of the mirror which are complete and will be happy
• you can be fully synced (except debuginfos) in less than 4 hours
• you save approx. 40% syncing traffic
• the bottleneck in syncing is your downlink and not your disk
• the load on your machine does not jump through the roof while syncing

Mirror requirements

This section is intentionally left blank until I can dig out the needed information. Please ask ftpadmin@suse.com for details.

--Kernelhacker 2005-09-07