Mirrors

The ACM mirrors a lot of material from elsewhere in the world. So much so that we have a common automation host for keeping our mirrors up-to-date, at the moment running on astrolabe.vm.acm.jhu.edu . (This is the same machine currently serving mirrors over HTTP).

There is not a whole lot to say here except to point at the configuration files, which are, conveniently, in AFS and public: file:///afs/acm.jhu.edu/service/mirrors .

In addition to the Debian archvsync tool, which provides the ftpsync tool used for mirroring Debian-alike repositories, we have locally-written tools plain-rsync and plain-git for maintaining mirrors of other varieties of upstreams. All of these utilities consult files in file:///afs/acm.jhu.edu/service/mirrors/etc for details of their execution; no configuraiton, other than the mirror name, is passed on their command lines.

The mirrors-updater host has a user (mirror) whose crontab oversees the actual invocation of these scripts.

Mirrors Updater

The mirrors updater will occasionally get a corrupted filesystem. Now, there’s an easy way to fix this. Run /afs/acm.jhu.edu/groups/admins.pub/scripts/mirrors/destroy_mirror_updater_vm.py to destroy the old (and broken) vm. Then run make_mirror_updater_vm.py with an unallocated floating ip, and the ID of the latest mirror_updater snapshot (look at cinder snapshot-list). You’ll need to follow the instructions to finish setting it up (just run a command with your admin hat on to land a keytab on the machine, and populate crontab).

Adding a Mirror

To add a mirror, then, you should do the following steps:

• Run /afs/acm.jhu.edu/group/admins.pub/scripts/new-afs-mirror-volume MIRROR , where MIRROR is the name of the thing you want to mirror.
• Make the appropriate entry in etc/ and adjust the crontab on the mirrors updater (i.e. mirrors-updater; look it up by its floating ip, it won’t have a name).

If your mirror uses, e.g. rsync or ftp, you are more or less done.

Git Mirrors

Mirrors using git are somewhat more interesting. For an example of a working git mirror, the ACM mirrors a git repository containing the plan9 source tree that can be cloned using the following command:

git clone http://mirrors.acm.jhu.edu/plan9/

To actually set this mirror volume up properly, after running the new volume script, you must run the following git commands (where, for plan9, $SOURCE is https://github.com/0intro/plan9):

git clone --mirror $SOURCE
git update-server-info

This will perform the first sync.

Nagios Monitoring

We use nagios to monitor mirror statuses. This lets us stay alert when a mirror sync fails because e.g. the person we are mirroring from has gone out of date. Generally, there are two types of mirrors that we monitor: “fast” mirrors, which are expected to sync at least daily and are checked every two days (in case of transient failures, which caused significant problems), and weekly mirrors, which are checked weekly.

To add a new mirror service to nagios, add the following stanza to one of nagios’s configuration files (i.e. trinidad-mirrors.cfg):

define service {
        use generic-service
        host_name astrolabe.vm
        service_description Mirror CTAN
        _FILE /afs/acm.jhu.edu/service/mirrors/log/rsync-ctan.log
        check_command file_age_fast_mirror
}

In this case, the example stanza is provided for our CTAN mirror, which is “fast”. For weekly mirrors, simply change the check command to file_age_weekly_mirror.