Thoughts on conferences

Posted Nov 23, 2011 1:33 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Thoughts on conferences by dmarti
Parent article: Thoughts on conferences

Exactly, it's amazing how many people do exactly that :-), but at the time you are chilling in the lobby it's usually not a problem, the peak problem actually happens during the keynote and the most packed sessions. When you get several hundred people in a room, each of which are carrying multiple wifi devices that they all set to update, then you really have headaches (why the people battle to get into the room and then do this rather than doing it in other, less crowded areas is a very interesting point to think about)

This is why last year we ran a local repository for Debian and Ubuntu. We tried to do so for Fedora, but they are not setup in a way that lets us do so.

Thoughts on conferences

Posted Nov 23, 2011 4:52 UTC (Wed) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link] (5 responses)

Mirrormanager for fedora can do exactly that for local private mirrors.

Contact the mirror manager admin or come by #fedora-admin on freenode.

Thanks
-sv

Thoughts on conferences

Posted Nov 23, 2011 23:48 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

with Debian and Ubuntu it's possible to do DNS trickery to point people who are requesting updates to a local server. The names involved are _only_ used for the distro repository.

If I understand the problems we ran into with Fedora last year correctly, we found that Fedora repositories are mixed in with other software on the server, so we can't just have a mirror of the Fedora software and redirect access to the local system as people trying to access the other things on the server will not find them.

Thoughts on conferences

Posted Nov 23, 2011 23:51 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

What about a transparent proxy? IIRC Debian has used that during DebConf some years and it worked even when I wasn't using the DNS supplied by the conference.

Thoughts on conferences

Posted Nov 23, 2011 23:58 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

we did that as well, it didn't help nearly as much as we hoped.

Thoughts on conferences

Posted Nov 24, 2011 13:40 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (1 responses)

> with Debian and Ubuntu it's possible to do DNS trickery to point people who are requesting updates to a local server.

From what I have read, with Fedora's MirrorManager, you can tell the Fedora mirroring infrastructure to point people coming from a range of IP addresses to your mirror. So, the effect would be similar to your DNS trickery.

See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Mirroring#H... for the details.

Thoughts on conferences

Posted Nov 25, 2011 1:09 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

thanks, that's very useful info.