I am not sure if this has been asked for before, I searched and could not find anything about it, if it has I am sorry for reposting it.

Does Linode offer an internal repo of the distro's they provide? If they do not, would there be sufficient need for them to be provided in each DC, on the internal IP only?

I know that the data used is not a huge amount per linode, but I would guess that if this was offered it would save Linode a fair bit of external bandwidth.

I think I suggested this on IRC, and am also interested. My DC is fremont. I use so little bandwidth these days that if someone on IRC can help me, I may be able to help offset the public IP costs of setting up a fremont Ubuntu repo on private IP.

http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif

Thanks for your suggestion.

-Chris

Forgive the retarded question but where is the misplaced apostrophe?

See the 3rd example in the cartoon. (the plural form)


Regarding your original question. Yes it's been discussed, though I'd have to search the forums myself to find the discussion. IIRC, in the end Linode isn't going to waste their resources on maintaining such a beast when the bandwidth used is really negligible in the grand scheme of things.

I think its the excessive apostrophication on "repo's".

ROTFL, reply storm

I always thought that distro's was a contraction of distributions, hence the apostrophe is correctly applied.

Anyway, if an enterprising client was gong to have an internal repo, for their own linodes, would other clients use it, or should they not bother?

"Distro" is, but because of its morphology no apostrophe is needed (since you're not leaving out letters in the middle).

But "Distros" is just the plural of "distro," so there's no need to add an additional apostrophe.

Per http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/mirror/2:



And that's just Ubuntu. Debian is 217GB for i386+amd64+all+source+security, and CentOS/Fedora/Gentoo are probably somewhat beefy as well.

Given that my home apt-cacher-ng is still well under 1GB over the past 30 days, with four PCs and two OS reinstalls, I don't see the bandwidth savings being worth the disk commitment, especially with awesome mirrors like http://mirror.anl.gov/ and http://mirrors.kernel.org/ being so danged fast.

There's no need to host the full repo though. As you pointed out, your local apt-cache is reasonably small, and I suspect that would be true even for a DC wide cache, since the vast majority of users are going to have the same basic package needs.

Hardly a "waste" of resources if that's what their clients WANT.

Last I checked, Linode was a service PROVIDER.

With 750G drives costing well under $100, maintaining several distro's (yes, it's supposed to have a apostrophe) is hardly a back breaker. Especially since once the hardware is setup (and a single box with a few large hard drives would suffice) it's pretty much self maintaining.

Although the bandwidth isn't all that much - it would be handy to have it come thru the local 100M port then the external pay-per-bit public interface.

No, it's not. Where did this folk myth get started?


But would the additional income justify the cost? Neither you nor I are in a position to judge that.

We're certainly in a position to influence it, through our future purchasing decisions; but I suspect that your knowledge of Linode's cash flows is roughly equivalent to mine.

JshWright: An apt-cacher-ng would probably work well, but that's not a repo Mine is at 3.2GB with a homogenized 9.10 i386 environment. However, that'd leave the non-Ubuntu/Debian people out in the cold. And if you're going to have a repo, you either need to have all the files someone might need, or a way to transparently get them.

vonskippy: See my previous rants re: the difference between "drives" and "storage." Gasoline is $2.85/gallon, but it sure costs more than 7 cents/mile to operate a car.

Also, "distros" has no apostrophe, unless we're referring to the distro's size or some other attribute of the distro. "distro" isn't a contraction, it's a shortened form of "distribution," like "phone" for "telephone."

EDIT: "once the hardware is setup" -> "once the hardware is set up"; "setup" is a noun, not a verb. caker backupped my apostrophe thunder, so I figure pickupping his not-a-verbing is only fair.