Vhost support

Dag Wieers dag at wieers.com
Wed Aug 23 12:12:18 GMT 2006


Hi,

Maybe this already supported in some way or another, or been discussed 
in the past but let me picture the problem first.

Currently mirrors that offer rsync support have their own filesystem 
layout and a path used on one rsync server would be different to the path 
on another rsync server.

Additionally, rsync is restricted to the IP it is listening on. And if you 
would want to have a second rsync server, you basicly need a second IP.

Now, the CentOS project makes use of different public mirrors to 
distribute their binaries and they use a geo-ip system to automatically 
point clients to different servers to spread the load. This works well for 
HTTP, but for rsync it would not work consistently except if they can 
re-organize the path-structure of public mirrors (or have a dedicated 
rsync server or CentOS that follows the pth structure we lay out).

Vhost support (much like HTTP 1.1) inside the rsync protocol would allow 
an administrator to set up different views or different filesystem 
structures for different hostnames to accomodate the universal location 
that clients would use.

Much like:

	http://mirrors.centos.org/centos/4/updates/i386/RPMS/

currently points on each server to the same location, we could have a:

	rsync://mirrors.centos.org/centos/4/updates/i386/RPMS/

I'm interested to know what the rsync developers think of this idea. How 
big a change it would be overall and at what timeframe (given there would 
be extensive development and testing) it could be included, if at all.

Thanks !
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]


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