MirrorCache

Distribution - Mirrors

Mirror infrastructure - How to setup a mirror - Tumbleweed mirrors

MirrorCache

Download redirector and Metalink generator

Vendor: openSUSE
Developer: Andrii Nikitin, Elisei Roca
License: GPL-2
Web: http://www.mirrorcache.org/

About

MirrorCache is an open source framework to run a content delivery network using mirror servers. It comes with features that MirrorBrain is lacking.

Features

Open source
Job Queue, including WebUI to manage jobs (e.g. mirror scans)
Tracks mirrors capability to serve http / https and ipv4 / ipv6 and route requests accordingly
WebUI for managing mirrors
Metalink generation

Topology

There's no need to do anything to be able to use MirrorCache. That's because MirrorCache has become the openSUSE standard for download redirection. Which means that the use of download.opensuse.org in the baseurl for Zypper repo files can be kept, just like before.

In order to reduce latency as much as possible for users around the world --mainly when updating their systems--, several regional instances of MirrorCache has been deployed to mainly serve and enhance download experience for the openSUSE community, globally. The current high level topology looks like this:

mirrorcache-eu.opensuse.org - European mirrors (EU);
mirrorcache-us.opensuse.org - North America mirrors (NA);
mirrorcache-br.opensuse.org - South American mirrors (SA);
mirrorcache-au.opensuse.org - Oceanic mirrors (OC);
mirrorcache-jp.opensuse.org - Japanese mirrors (JP);
mirrorcache.opensuse.org - rest of the mirrors. Plus it redirects EU, NA, SA, OC and JP users to the corresponding instance.

Regions may also have secondary MirrorCache instances to better cover their territory, reducing the distance between user and server, thus reducing even more the latency.

This was made possible thanks to the GeoIP feature implemented on libzypp. Users should have this already in their /etc/zypp/zypp.conf configuration file, by default:

download.use_geoip_mirror = true

Basically, requests being made to download.opensuse.org will be rewritten to go to a corresponding regional MirrorCache instance instead, whenever possible.

You can check which regional instance Zypper should redirect requests to on this page.

Troubleshooting

In most of cases a good start is to review /var/log/zypper.log and check out the output of curl -IL for the problematic URL, for example:

user $ curl -IL https://download.opensuse.org/distribution/leap/15.3/iso/openSUSE-Leap-15.3-DVD-x86_64-Current.iso

How to get help

There's usually someone around #opensuse-admin you can chat with, at libera.chat;
For recurrent/persistent download issues, you can open a ticket by sending an email to the openSUSE Heroes, the openSUSE infrastructure sysadmins.
You can also open an issue on the GitHub repo for software-related issues.

External links