Anybody interesting in splitting/sponsoring the cost of setting up a lone linode to act as a dedicated 'mirror' for each DC?

A Full Deb mirror would be 5-8.5GB
a rsync Gento mirror says it's only 250 MB according to this, but that seems kinda small
a full Fedora/RH mirror is slightly large (those numbers are in KB).

250 Mb is just the portage tree - the source for whatever you choose to install is fetched from wherever the ebuild specifies.

_________________
/ Peter

That would be 14.15GB, then.

Also, it's an interesting idea. I believe various ideas for mirrors have floated round the forums too.

Ok, i dislike how Gentoo names everything, lemme get this straight.

The Portage Tree is just a tree of available software?
Then when you 'emerge' (i hate that name lol) a package it pulls the info from the portage tree, about where it can dl the source?

Keeping the Portage Tree updated is through running 'emerge --sync' and that mirrors it with an rsync mirror?
Finally are distfiles the actual source?

You've basically got everything correct, yep.

"emerge --sync" connects to rsync.gentoo.org and downloads the latest Portage tree, which contains what are known as ebuilds, which tell Gentoo how to compile certain packages, and so on. They also tell the OS where on a Gentoo distfiles mirror they can find the files to download. The distfiles mirror is where all the actual tarballs and such are held. There are quite a lot of them around.

Hope that helps.

It's a lot more information then that, but yeah. Also, in small rare cases, if there's a patch that needs to be applied to a package, and it's small, they'll throw those in portage as well. Portage also contains any modified default configuration files that work best with the rest of the Gentoo system. It also has init scripts for services as well I believe.

A Gentoo distfiles mirror is currently 43 GiB. No Linode mirror for that anytime soon.

_________________
/ Peter

Wow, cool little tidbit of info... I had no idea it was that big.

Dizzam

Neither did I. The Gentoo site says that a machine being offered as a package mirror needs 40 GB of free disk, but when I checked on the mirror at that I normally use (University of Esslingen) the distfiles directory contains 24,392 files totalling 43,914,696 kB! It is so big because it contains all the versions of a given package that are still current - for example fifteen different versions of kdebase at 20 MiB a pop.

_________________
/ Peter

Wow, I completely forgot they have to store multiple versions.