Infrastructure/Mirroring

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Fedora is fortunate to have over 200 volunteer mirror sites globally, which helps distribute the Fedora software to end users. We greatly appreciate our mirror sites and their system administrators.

Communicating

• Mailing lists: mirror-list (announcements only) and mirror-list-d (discussion)
• IRC: #fedora-admin on Freenode
• Administrative changes: send email to mirror-admin@fedoraproject.org

What are the size estimates?

• http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/DIRECTORY_SIZES.txt

Export Compliance

By downloading Fedora software, you acknowledge that you understand all of the following: Fedora software and technical information may be subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (the “EAR”) and other U.S. and foreign laws and may not be exported, re-exported or transferred (a) to any country listed in Country Group E:1 in Supplement No. 1 to part 740 of the EAR (currently, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan & Syria); (b) to any prohibited destination or to any end user who has been prohibited from participating in U.S. export transactions by any federal agency of the U.S. government; or (c) for use in connection with the design, development or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, or rocket systems, space launch vehicles, or sounding rockets, or unmanned air vehicle systems. You may not download Fedora software or technical information if you are located in one of these countries or otherwise subject to these restrictions. You may not provide Fedora software or technical information to individuals or entities located in one of these countries or otherwise subject to these restrictions. You are also responsible for compliance with foreign law requirements applicable to the import, export and use of Fedora software and technical information.

How can someone become a public mirror?

Becoming an official public mirror is easy, and getting easier. All we request is that your site have sufficient bandwidth and disk space to handle the load. Each Fedora release can consume upwards of 200GB of disk space, and downloaders can consume as much bandwidth as you've got. Mirror sites have at least a 100Mbit/sec* connection to the Internet, many have Gigabit or larger pipes. As of the Fedora 8 release, the total space consumed on the master server, thus what a mirror could consume, is 1.1TB and growing. A 1-2TB volume would be most appropriate for a long-term mirror. This content is hardlinked; if you can't hardlink (e.g. you're on AFS), you'll need much more disk space. Actual space consumed is noted at [1] .

• 100Mbit/sec is the rule for countries with adequate mirror coverage already. We can make exceptions for new mirrors in countries that have few mirrors. Connections to Internet2, National Lambda Rail, GEANET2, RedIRIS, or other such high speed research and educational networks are always appreciated.

How can someone make a private mirror?

Private mirrors are mirrors that reside entirely within an organization (company, school, etc.) and can only be accessed by members of that organization. They exist to speed up distributing Fedora within an organization, where local bandwidth costs are far less than going across the Internet.

Private mirrors behave similarly to public mirrors, with a few exceptions:

• Private mirrors are never listed in the MirrorManager publiclist pages.
• Private mirrors cannot pull from the master Fedora download servers. They must pull from another listed public mirror.
• Private mirrors should include IP netblocks in their MirrorManager configuration. This allows your network-local users to be automatically redirected to your mirror. You may list IP netblocks (e.g. 18.0.0.0/8), or if your network is NAT'd, the hostname of your NAT gateway.
• Private mirrors are not crawled by the MirrorManager web crawler. As a corollary:
• Private mirrors must run report_mirror to inform the MirrorManager database of their content. If you don't run report_mirror, your clients will not be automatically redirected.

You may also find it more beneficial to run an IntelligentMirror instead of a full rsync mirror. In this way, only the updates your local users actually need will be cached on your local mirror, saving you the bandwidth from downloading updates you don't actually need.

MirrorManager: the Fedora Mirror Management system

The MirrorManager software keeps track of all the mirrors without requiring a lot of manual text file editing. Admins of the mirrors must ensure that the report_mirror script available with the mirrormanager-client is run after each rsync to update the Mirrormanager database.

Signing up

Fedora Account System

• You must have an account in the Fedora Account System . (More info also at .) You are not required to sign the Contributors License Agreement to merely mirror Fedora content, but you must do so if you wish to contribute to other aspects of Fedora.
• If a public mirror, you must send an email to mirror-admin@fedoraproject.org introducing yourself, stating you would like to become a mirror, your IP address, your location (country), and your outbound bandwidth available for the mirror. Private mirrors are encouraged to send a similar note.
• You must subscribe to mirror-list and (optionally) mirror-list-d (discussion) to be notified of new releases.

Registering in MirrorManager

• Log into mirrormanager using your FAS account.
• Create a new Site.
• create a new Host, and sign up that host for the Categories of content you'll carry, any other site administrators you want, your site's IP addresses used for our Access Control List, and the other details listed there if applicable to you.
• Please run report_mirror after each rsync run.
• You may list your site's IP address ranges (Netblocks). Clients coming from an IP address within your netblock will be automatically redirected to your mirror for any content you carry.
• You may list your site's BGP Autonomous System Number (ASN). Clients on your ASN will be automatically redirected to your mirror for any content you carry. One way to lookup up your ASN is to query it from the routeviews.org DNS servers. It is like a PTR record lookup, but at a specific server. For example, to look up 143.166.1.1, type:

$ dig txt 1.1.166.143.asn.routeviews.org @archive.routeviews.org
;; ANSWER SECTION:
1.1.166.143.asn.routeviews.org.	86400 IN TXT	"3614" "143.166.0.0" "16"

Here, the answer is in the TXT record, the first value, 3614.

Mirroring

The only sane way to do mirroring is to use rsync. Note the options -H (hardlinks), --delay-updates, --numeric-ids and --delete-after are required to ensure your mirror content stays valid even during a new rsync run, until all the new data is available.

rsync -vaH --exclude-from=${EXCLUDES} --numeric-ids --delete --delete-after --delay-updates \
 rsync://download.fedora.redhat.com/fedora-enchilada ${LOCAL_DIR}

• You may exclude any content you desire, such as architectures, using an EXCLUDES file.

• Please pull from one of the Tier 1 mirrors. See Infrastructure/Mirroring/Tiering . Instead of using one of the Tier 1 servers, you may wish to pull from another fast mirror that's closer to you. Contact the respective mirror admins to be added to their ACL.

• You should sync shortly after 0800 UTC (when rawhide is pushed), 1400 UTC (when bitflips occur), and another 3-5 times per day (updates are manually released).

• You should add some random value to the start time of your rsync jobs, to even out load on the upstream mirrors. A cron line might look like:

 45 */6 * * * perl -le 'sleep rand 1800' && bash -l ~/mirror-fedora > /dev/null

• If you are using rsync 3.0 or higher, you can use the --delete-delay option instead of --delete-after, which is reported to provide faster performance.

Running report_mirror

MirrorManager includes a tool, report_mirror which can upload to the mirror database that you completed a run and what content you've got. This makes generating the yum mirrorlists and all other pages much much simpler. Please run report_mirror after every rsync job completes.

yum install mirrormanager-client

or get the files directly from the git tree report_mirror files . Or it can be obtained using git:

git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/git/mirrormanager
  or
git clone http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/mirrormanager/ 

You need both report_mirror and report_mirror.conf, and must edit report_mirror.conf to include the content you're carrying and the path to that content on your disk.

Available content

The available content modules by rsync, and their point in the directory tree are:

Suggested rsync modules

rsync module	Description	path on master server	Comments
fedora-enchilada0	Fedora - the whole enchilada	/pub/fedora	Please use this if you can, it provides the all current Fedora content, including pre-bitflip content. This is open to specific mirrors by request. Mirrors participating in our tiering should use this.
fedora-epel0	Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux	/pub/epel	Please use this to mirror EPEL
fedora-archive	Historical Fedora releases	/pub/archive	Fedora Core 1-6 and Extras 3-6, and obsolete releases 7 and higher
fedora-secondary	Fedora Secondary Arches	/pub/fedora-secondary
alt	Fedora Other	/pub/alt

These other modules exist for legacy purposes, and should be avoided by current mirrors.

rsync module	Description	path on master server	Comments
fedora-enchilada	Fedora - the whole enchilada	/pub/fedora	Please use this if you can, it provides the all Fedora content except pre-bitflip content. This is open for the general public to use.
fedora-linux-releases	Fedora Linux Releases	/pub/fedora/linux/releases
fedora-linux-development	Fedora Linux Development (Rawhide)	/pub/fedora/linux/development
fedora-linux-updates	Fedora Linux Updates	/pub/fedora/linux/updates
fedora-epel	Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux	/pub/epel	EPEL doesn't do the bitflip trick, so this is the same as fedora-epel0 above.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Beta

RHEL beta releases are also managed via MirrorManager. Fedora's Tier 1 mirrors may sync these modules.

rsync module	Description	path on master server	Comments
rhel-beta	RHEL	/pub/redhat	on rhm3.redhat.com

DVDs, CDs, and the exploded trees

When a new release is available, it can be bandwidth-efficient to download only the ISOs first (say, the DVD ISOs), then explode those into the directory structure, then run a full normal rsync run. This lets you avoid downloading the same RPMs twice (both on ISOs and as plain RPMs). There's a tool somewhere to help do this.

Regular hardlink runs

While the Fedora release maintainers try to keep as little redundant packaging around as possible, there are some duplicate packages in the tree. For example, when a Fedora Test release comes out, the package set included there looks remarkably like that of the development tree from a few days before. By copying the development tree over into the new Test directory before starting your rsync run, and using rsync -H, you can avoid downloading all that content a second time.

In addition, it's good practice to run a tool like hardlink++ on your tree occasionally (say, weekly), to ensure as much of your tree as possible is hardlinked.

Pre-Release: Copying Development tree to new release directory

In the days leading up to a release, either test or final, the development tree will stop taking new packages, and will closely resemble what winds up in the new release. As a mirror, you can avoid downloading content that already is in your copy of the development tree that matches what's in the release tree by copying those packages using hardlinks, such as:

cp -lr fedora/linux/development/13/i386/os fedora/linux/releases/13/Fedora/i386/
cp -lr fedora/linux/development/13/x86_64/os fedora/linux/releases/13/Fedora/x86_64/
cp -lr fedora/linux/development/13/source fedora/linux/releases/13/Fedora/

and then start the rsync process, which will clean up any changes and fix up the timestamps.

Rsync Configuration (sample)

Larger mirrors, like kernel.org, have slightly custom front-ends to rsync (mainly so that they can have a single rsync instance and have multiple ip based vhost configuration files) That said what follows is a sample rsync configuration file for public syncing (this is not intended for private pre-bitflip mirroring)

[fedora]
        comment         = Fedora - RedHat community project
        path            = <path to your fedora directory>
        exclude         = lost+found/
        read only       = true
        max connections = 100
        lock file       = /var/run/rsyncd-mirrors.lock
        uid             = <user id (numeric, or textual) of an anonymous style user who should have read access>
        gid             = <group id (numeric, or textual) of an anonymous style user who should have read access>
        transfer logging = yes
        timeout         = 900
        ignore nonreadable = yes
        dont compress   = *.gz *.tgz *.zip *.z *.Z *.rpm *.deb *.bz2
        refuse options = checksum

Things to explicitly note:

• The path above should be a full path to your fedora directory
• You should *really* want to leave this read-only
• Make sure your uid/gid are set to public users, not to the user that you run as your sync agent. If you set this to the user who does your syncs you will be inadvertently giving the public full pre-bitflip access.
• Make sure you have the 'refuse options' set to checksum, your server will be *MUCH* happier with this set, as it will prevent public users from performing a checksum run against you. This can be incredibly I/O abusive, so should not be available to the general public.

HTTPd Configuration

Keepalives

HTTP Keepalives should be enabled on your mirror server to speed up client downloads. By default, Fedora's Apache httpd package has keepalives disabled. They should be enabled, with a timeout of at least 2 seconds (the default of 15 seconds might be too high for a heavily loaded mirror server, but 2 seconds is sufficient and appropriate for yum).

KeepAlive On
KeepAliveTimeout 2
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100

Other http servers such as lighttpd have keepalives enabled by default.

Caching of metadata

We don't want caching proxy servers between our mirrors and our end user systems to cache our yum repository metadata. So, add explicit metadata handling. (Suggested by the OpenSUSE download redirector.)

   <LocationMatch "\.(xml|xml\.gz|xml\.asc|sqlite)$">
       Header set Cache-Control "must-revalidate"
       ExpiresActive On
       ExpiresDefault "now"
   </LocationMatch>

Redirecting ISO downloads to FTP

While no longer a recommended practice, the following mod_rewrite rules will force all *.iso files to be downloaded via FTP. In this example HEAD requests are not redirected, so the MirrorManager crawler is not disrupted.

RewriteCond     %{REQUEST_METHOD} GET
RewriteRule     ^(.*\.iso)$ ftp://myserver/$1  [L,R=301] 

Content Types

ISO and RPM files should be served using MIME Content-Type: application/octet-stream. In Apache, this can be done inside a VirtualHost or similar section:

<VirtualHost *:80>
AddType application/octet-stream .iso
AddType application/octet-stream .rpm
</VirtualHost>

Limiting Download Accelerators

Download accelerators will try to open the same file many times, and request chunks, hoping to download them in parallel. This can overload heavily loaded mirror servers, especially on release day. Here are some tricks to thwart such activities.

To limit connections to ISO dirs by some amount per IP:

<IfModule mod_limitipconn.c>
MaxConnPerIP 6
</IfModule>

To block ranged requests as this is what download accelerators do indeed:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Range} [0-9] $
RewriteRule \.iso$ / [F,L] 

Similar things can be done with iptables and the recent module, which might give you a little more ability to control what is being done, either by limiting new connections or by dropping 50% of a users packets.

Logging Partial Content Downloads

Partial content can be logged correctly using apache:

# this includes actual counts of actual bytes received (%I) and
# sent (%O); this requires the mod_logio module to be loaded.

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" %I %O \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined

Pre-bitflip mirroring

Several days before each public release, the content will be staged to the master mirror servers, but with restricted permissions on the directories (generally mode 0750), specifically, not world readable.

Mirror servers should have several different user/group accounts on their server, for running the different public services. Typically you find:

• HTTP server runs as user apache, group apache
• FTP server runs as user ftp, group ftp
• RSYNC server runs as user rsync, group rsync
• a user account for downloading content from the masters (e.g. user mirror, group mirror).

The user account used to download content from the masters must be not be the same as the HTTP, FTP, or RSYNC server accounts. This guarantees that content downloaded with permissions 0750 will not be made available via your public servers yet.

On the morning of the public release, the permissions on the directories on the master servers will change to 0755 - world readable. This is called the bitflip.

Mirrors may either rsync one more time to pick up these new permissions (but won't have to download all the data again), or preferably, can schedule a batch job to bitflip:

$ echo "chmod a+rx /pub/fedora/linux/releases/9" | at '14:45 UTC May 13 2008'

Serving content to other mirrors

Tier 1 mirrors will necessarily need to share content to Tier 2 mirrors before the bitflip. This is done by running another instance of the rsync daemon, on a different port (e.g. 874), with an Access Control List to prevent public downloads, running as a user in the same group as downloaded the content (e.g. group mirror). This could be user mirror, group mirror, who has group read/execute permissions on the still-private content.

Tier 1 mirrors have a tendency to use different authentication methods for granting access to these non-public downloads, they vary from maintaining IP based ACL's to assigning username/password combinations to mirrors wishing to sync from them. Each method has advantages / disadvantages, the IP list is 'simpler' from a mirrormanager perspective as mirrormanager can give you the list of IP's but from an automation standpoint can be more difficult (as rsync's configuration file does not allow that ACL list to be stored in a separate file). Username / passwords can be more versatile as sites mirroring can change IPs without notifying you, but it's easier for those credentials to leak out and get miss-used.

Mirror Map

This map is updated daily.

Recognition

This product includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com/.