How we will use the Celeron systems in Europe hasn't been decided yet - there's still regular discussion going on in the usual technical discussion place, #mediawiki. Anyone not participating there routinely is missing a high proportion of the productive technical discussions.
The options:
1. Split by language and project. We've done this before. It's easy and well understood. It's limited when we end up having many different proxy locations because it's hard to load balance and because people in one country don't only work on one language. It's very likely that we'll do this at first, even if we change later.
2. There are several ways to identify country given an IP address. At least three anti-spam DNS servers do this and there are public lists of IP ranges by country. A very well understood solution but not one we have experience of (unless you cont me working on an open source spam blocking project which supports it). The Freenode IRC network which hosts the IRC channels uses this approach and one of their technical people likes us, was involved in developing their solution and offered asistance a few weeks ago. The information isn't perfectly accurate but it's fairly good - good enough.
3. There is at least one solution which uses internet topology analysis to determine the optimal server to send traffic to based on the IP address. It's easy enough - the routers on the internet already track this. The big advantage of this is that it will work well for any number of remote sites. When we have 50 remote sites, people will be directed to the closest one to them (and then load balancing can offload it if necessary). See http://www.supersparrow.org/ for one solution of this type.
We may well start with 1 and move to 3 later. 2 is probably worth skipping if we can - it's not as good 3 and doesn't scale to a large number of places as well. Initial tests will almost certainly use 1 for proving the concept of offloading traffic from the US based Squids and sort out any problems.
But none of this is decided yet. We won't know for a month or more, probably.
On Thu, 22 Jul 2004 02:24:25 -0400, user_Jamesday user_jamesday@myrealbox.com wrote:
- Split by language and project.
Probably the easiest way to start.
- There are several ways to identify country given an IP address.
I prefer this method, using custom-tailored DNS responses. DNS is a tried-and-true technology that scales sub-linearly with traffic. Using static tables (either via BIND 9's "views" or some sort of static route magic) is simple and well-tested.
- There is at least one solution which uses internet topology analysis to determine the
optimal server to send traffic to based on the IP address. It's easy enough - the routers on the internet already track this. The big advantage of this is that it will work well for any number of remote sites. When we have 50 remote sites, people will be directed to the closest one to them (and then load balancing can offload it if necessary). See http://www.supersparrow.org/ for one solution of this type.
Are you sure this isn't vaporware? (Version 0.0.0.0 doesn't sound very promising to me...)
I'm also not sure how this is supposed to work... is this still a DNS-based solution? If so, won't it require a significant rewrite of either portions of BIND or other nameserver software, in order to utilize the supersparrow libraries (or their equivalent)?
We may well start with 1 and move to 3 later. 2 is probably worth skipping if we can
- it's not as good 3 and doesn't scale to a large number of places as well.
2 scales just fine to any number of places. The problem with 2 is that it relies on coarsely grained static tables to determine topology, whereas 3 could presumably determine topology on a more detailed level (and dynamically).
Initial tests will almost certainly use 1 for proving the concept of offloading traffic from the US based Squids and sort out any problems.
That sounds sensible.
But none of this is decided yet. We won't know for a month or more, probably.
I'll make sure to hop on the IRC channel sometime soon (I have too much trouble multi-tasking IRC with other tasks, and I've been busy with "real" work).
-Bill Clark
user_Jamesday wrote:
How we will use the Celeron systems in Europe hasn't been decided yet - there's still regular discussion going on in the usual technical discussion place, #mediawiki. Anyone not participating there routinely is missing a high proportion of the productive technical discussions.
Bill... I think that comment could be seen as a suggestion to join the fun on irc :-)
And if you are bored one day, we might discuss again that feature for information display on all wikimedia projects ? I would love this.
Hum ?
ant
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