Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

It just occurred to me, as I fired up my VMWare copy of Ubuntu and searched its universe repositories, and searched my local RPM mirrors on Fedora Core, for packages of "dar", the Disk Archiver of which I am enamoured, that surely there are local Ubuntu mirrors that I can use here on the ANU campus (I'm doing this from work). I've already found the local mirrors of the various RPM repositories that I use: http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au, http://mirror.optus.net, http://mirror.pacific.net.au/, http://public.www.planetmirror.com/, and others.

I know other people on campus use Ubuntu. I know about http://debian.anu.edu.au, although I haven't configured my Ubuntu installation to use it as a source. I personally think it makes the Internet a better place to get your new and updated packages from the closest mirror you can. If your ISP has a mirror, then definitely use that because it almost certainly won't use up your download gigabytes per month quota.

So imagine if there was a system whereby users could submit and update yum and apt-get configurations based on IP ranges. Then a simple package would be able to look up which configuration would apply to their IP address, and it would automatically be installed. Instantly you'd get the fastest, most cost-effective mirrors available. You could probably do the lookup as a DNS query, too. It'd even save bandwidth for the regular mirrors and encourage ISPs to set up mirrors and maintain the configurations, knowing that this bandwidth saving would be instantly felt in their network rather than relying on their customers to find their mirrors and know how to customise their configurations to suit.

Hmmmm.... Need to think about this.