Turning on a new mirror of software.virtualmin.com

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#1 Sun, 07/09/2017 - 17:37
Joe
Joe's picture

Turning on a new mirror of software.virtualmin.com

Howdy all,

A while back, we had a hard disk failure on the server that hosts our software repositories. We brought it back online, but we wanted to add some redundancy to the picture, so I built a couple of mirror servers. It took a while to get the license management dealt with in a secure way (all mirrors have to communicate with the license server in order to be able to serve Virtualmin Pro packages). But, now a tinc private network is up and running, and I've been able to run test installs across all of the current versions of our supported distros.

So, I'm going to add the new server to DNS for one of those mirrors today, so future installs can come from multiple repository servers. This should not affect anyone, except installs might get a little faster for some users some of the time (since there will be multiple servers all with 100Mbps uplinks). In the next few days, I'll be turning on Geo DNS features, so that people in Europe will get the server in Paris, while people in the US will get the server in Dallas. I'll post about it when that happens, too, as it's another opportunity for things to go wrong. Right now, DNS will just round-robin across both servers, so anybody could hit either server. Both are fast, and I've tested installs from both on servers in both the US and Europe, so it's mostly a wash. Slight higher latency when it's across the ocean, but doesn't notably slow down an installation.

Since this probably won't actually affect anyone, I'm posting here just to request that if you do have a problem installing over the next day or two, and it spits errors about our software repositories (those hosted on software.virtualmin.com), let me know about it! We always want to know about problems with our repositories, but we especially want to know when making changes that might break stuff. (Also note that there are often errors about distribution repos, which can usually be ignored, since they usually can fallback to another mirror...but, we have no control over anything other than software.virtualmin.com, so we don't need to hear about OS mirror problems, unless they prevent you from installing, and we may be able to lend guidance on working around it.)

Cheers, Joe