22111 - External mirroring of ftp.mozilla.org a month out of date

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(mozilla.org Graveyard :: Server Operations, task, P3)

Description

[Sean Richardson]

Just tried a dozen mirror sites on four continents, and none had any
subdirectories newer than 1999-11-22-17-M12/ in /mozilla/nightly/
This makes following the link from http://www.mozilla.org/binaries.html to
http://www.mozilla.org/mirrors.html an exercise in frustration for anyone
looking for current binaries.

If I recall correctly, around that time the list of nightly binaries was
truncated, and two directories appeared in the
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/ dated 2000-02-29 ...
suggesting that a new server was tested and put into service at that time.

Does this also mean that the M12 release will not be picked up
by most or all mirrors? I'm guessing that it may, if the reason for
the lack of mirroring is that the ftp.mozilla.org server is no longer
at the same address or domain name that the mirrors have been looking,
or the mirrors aren't seeing something they expect to see.

BTW, the reason I tried the mirrors was that komodo.mozilla.org is not at
present answering anonymous ftp or http requests from here. Ping works fine.
Just in case that's news.

Could this be a regression of bug 18214 (ls-lR not getting updated) in this
case since the server was replaced or restarted?

Comment 1

[Risto Kotalampi]

Looks like this is true... but I also saw some mirrors being up-to-date (just
checking /pub/ls-lR file though).

That's about time when we swinged ftp server to be hosted by our own systems and
wu-ftpd 2.6.0. There's known issue with that server and some clients. This is
not really a problem in wu-ftpd that only fixed some flaws dealing with ftp
protocol and caused some clients not to work properly. mirror being one of
those.

Take a look: http://www.cetis.hvu.nl/~koos/wu-ftpd-faq.html#QA78

We need to get a list of sites that are using non-patched mirror and get them to
patch it or to use some other tools for mirroring.

Comment 2

[Risto Kotalampi]

Ok, I have compiled wu-ftpd with option --enable-badclients. This should allow
mirrors and other broken clients to sync.

Comment 3

[Risto Kotalampi]

I think I'll spin up a rsyncd server to give out ftp-root as well.

Comment 4

[Risto Kotalampi]

There's not much IS can do about it. Moving to Dawn's queue. If any ftp mirror 
wants access to rsync server I can give access to them. I would like to see 
rsync server as preferred method to mirror the site.

Comment 5

[Dawn Endico]

It looks like --enable-badclients fixed the original problems.
If problems crop up again I'll suggest to people that they use
rsync and hook them up with Risto.