[arch-general] rankmirrors and new mirrrorlist format

[Jude DaShiell]

The only reason I bought this up at all was because on more than one Linux 
distro site there's requests for people to use mirrors that are 
geographically close to them since the admins of those sites apparently 
check logs and kick off people that are very far away from the download 
sites.  I agree with you in these days of broad band connections and 
ethernet cards such things maybe ought not to matter all that much but 
apparently they do to other webmasters and ftpadmins. On Sat, 14 Aug 2010, 
C Anthony Risinger wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 8:27 PM, Jude DaShiell <jdashiel at shellworld.net> wrote:
>> One of the more important fields missing from many Linux distros mirror
>> lists is the geographical location field that would provide a country and a
>> state/province for each mirror.  That information is stored in some data
>> base on the internet, but not everybody who looks at a mirror list for the
>> first time is necessarily going to know which tool to send the list through
>> to get all those geographical locations appended to that mirror list.  A
>> guess on my part would be the whois data base but what command to run to get
>> the capacity the url, and the geographic locations out in a mirror list and
>> only get that information I don't yet know.
>
> i think the geographic info would be somewhat superfluous; while i
> don't know of a command offhand to provide this information, the IP
> address of mirrors can be geolocated.  additionally, geographic
> location has little to do with your network location... when i lived
> in montana (USA), every single packet i sent was routed through salt
> lake city, utah, several hundred miles away, before going anywhere
> else.
>
> if anything, rankmirrors itself could provide this information; but it
> wouldn't be that useful in deciding on a mirror.  just get the top 6
> or so, pick one that works well, and forget about it :-)
>
> kernel.org works fine for me.
>
> C Anthony
>
>