John on S8

[Cef]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 07:27, John wrote:

> Because some people pay for (excess) downloads?

Always a very good reason. Australia does have an issue with stupid telcos 
charging way too much money for data.

> For many, local sites don't count. Here, ftp.wa.au.debian.org is on WAIX
> and is free to clients of WAIX. Presumably, the Optusnet archive is free
> to Optus clients.

Unfortunately Optus DO charge to access their mirror. Their mirror purely 
provides a speed boost (500-700KB/sec is always nice).

> Local mirrors tend to be faster; a day or so ago I was downloading
> something at 40K bytes/sec on a link capable of ~150.

Of course, you need to trust your mirror not to be compromised, and you don't 
want to only rely on the mirror as it may not be updating anymore. I'd be 
happy if we could retrieve md5sums from both the mirror and the main security 
repository and compare them before accepting that the files from the mirror 
are fine, and if they aren't, fall back to the main security repository. This 
also implies that the files from the mirror also match the md5sums listed. 
However I'm guessing that this would require a significant rework of apt to 
achieve, and would not be feasible in the short term. Definitely not in time 
for warty.

Also, apt doesn't seem to support rsync as a transport, which would be another 
way of saving data, perhaps not initially, but definitely in the long run. Of 
course, that also puts a cpu burden on the machines hosting the files, as 
rsync is not exactly light on the cpu or memory.

-- 
 Stuart Young - aka Cefiar - cef at optus.net