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

[Moinak Ghosh]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 7:49 AM, Al Hopper <al at logical-approach.com> wrote:
> 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.....

   The mirrors need to be geographically nearer which would also mean that
   they should be reachable from a local ISP with less hops. Ubuntu has
   worldwide mirrors:
   https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archivemirrors
   These help reduce network latency by avoiding long-distance links.

   AFAIK the trouble with trying to mirror the OpenSolaris pkg repo is that
   you can only do content mirroring with pkgrecv+pkgsend. All the FMRIs
   will have new timestamps and Pkg will treat them as new packages. So
   if you point your Osol installation to this mirror you will end up
downloading
   and re-installing gigabytes of software even though binaries are
all the same.

Regards,
Moinak.

>
> 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/
> _______________________________________________
> advocacy-discuss mailing list
> advocacy-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/advocacy-discuss
>