[arch-dev-public] Mirror status page

[Dan McGee]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 1:53 AM, Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de> wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Sep 2010 17:59:44 -0500, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> We'll bring it up here before we make a more public announcement to
>> iron out any kinks, but it is live and updating once an hour:
>> http://www.archlinux.org/mirrors/status/
>
> Nicely done. Here are some suggestions:
Appreciate you looking and responding.

> * You should rethink about putting those equations into yellow boxes
> with a bigger font size. They are not really the most important content
> on that site.
This really has more to do with the theme/styling on the entire side
and less to do with this page. I honestly don't think it distracts too
much, but if a lot of people do we should adjust the theme. It is odd
that the <tt/> and <code/> tags don't really match up; you can see I
used both of them.

Should I just switch to <tt/> everywhere?

> * One should add to the "μ Delay" that it has an error of about an hour
> (=frequency of your cron job). Especially those with a delay of less
> than an hour sync hourly for real.
I'm not sure I follow your logic- if they sync on the top of the hour,
then we're pretty close to the "average" delay, which is halfway
between 0-59 minutes anyway. I think it might be worth scheduling the
cronjob in a slightly different way to not give any mirror an
advantage. If we sync on the following schedule (13 times in 12
hours), no one time would get the benefit:
0:04 0:59 1:54 2:49 3:45 4:40 5:35 6:30 7:26 8:21 9:16 10:11 11:07

Sounds confusing of course, but would this make things better?

> * mirror6.bjtu.edu.cn fails because it only has an ipv6 connection.
> Maybe just ignore non-ipv4 hosts until we have ipv6 connection for
> gerolde, too.
Hmm, we don't track this anywhere. Probably can add a field for it.

> * Make the mirror urls "clickable"
I thought of this, but not sure what to click through to. We can
easily do a mirror info page, but we can't/shouldn't show everything
publicly.

> * It would be very nice to have all this information and probably more
> we have in the mirror db available via json. This way it can be easily
> used by other sites or tools like reflector. See
> https://git.archlinux.de/www.archlinux.de.git/tree/pages/MirrorStatusJSON.php
> for a simple example.
Sounds like a feature request. :) I think we could do this for a lot
of the website- packages, groups, etc. I like the idea though.

> * Would be nice if you could use the iso country names. E.g. its not
> Great Britain but United Kingdom or Russian Federation instead of
> Russia.
We've been using these same names for ages. I can give you permission
to go in and update things as you see fit if you'd like- the country
is just freeform right now, there aren't choices.

Getting this tied to an actual country object could make GeoIP
integration of some sort be useful later down the road.

See:
* http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/5446
* http://code.google.com/p/django-countries/
* http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/1476/

-Dan