[advocacy-discuss] ipkg image-update woes - worldwide opensolaris mirrors will help opensolaris adoption rates

[Al Hopper]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 7:12 PM, Richard Frost
<richard.j.frost at gmail.com> wrote:
> I love the new OpenSolaris build and have been promoting it to friends
> however there is in my mind a major problem with updates that makes it near
> impossible to update your install unless you are in the United States. As I
> am used to the ease of Ubuntu updates where my local ISP mirrors the repos,
> updates are painless and easy and fast.
>
> I did a traceroute from my machine to the single OpenSolaris repo and
> counted over 22 hops! ;-(
>
> I have seen a number of posts from people complaining about pkg image-update
> failures - I just cant update to build 90/91 - the best I get is 30% to 40 %
> then the whole process dies in a heap and leaves a trail of incomplete ZFS
> root snapshots which I had to manually remove with beadm. Its unfortunate
> that pkg image-update does not resume where it left off - it just goes and
> creates a new snapshot and starts all over again ;-(
>
> I know this is a work in progress, but is it possible to have at least ONE
> mirror of opensolaris packages hosted by Sun in each major country - at
> least Australia as our overseas links are not that great.
>
> If we want more users to come on board, I think that the whole process of
> system updates should be smooth and fast and in my mind, this is a major
> deal breaker for newcomers who will just go back to their old OS which has
> decent update support.
>
> Cheers
> Richard

Would an IPS repository hosted on genunix.org resolve this issue?  As
you probably already know, Genunix.Org is a very well connected site
with high-bandwidth/low-latency connections to all the major carriers.
 Or do you believe that the IPS (delivery) site must be in-country?
Or... is there some other characteristic of IPS that *requireds* the
IPS site to be close-by, i.e., be available over a low-latency
connection.

I'm trying to gain an understanding of what the root cause of your issue is.....

Regards,

-- 
Al Hopper  Logical Approach Inc,Plano,TX al at logical-approach.com
                   Voice: 972.379.2133 Timezone: US CDT
OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Member - Apr 2005 to Mar 2007
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/ogb_2005-2007/