Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sitkack 4486 days ago
Mirrors shouldn't be a security concern, the signatures of packages should come from "headquarters", same goes for reliability, clients should be able to, and SHOULD pull from multiple sites simultaneously.
2 comments

Even if package signing works perfectly, when I connect to a mirror and request a patch for foo, the mirror learns my IP address and the fact I have an as-yet-unpatched version of foo.
Very true on the signatures. Using multiple sites isn't necessary though, imho.
I could be wrong, but it seems like a nice hack to pull for say 3 mirrors at the same time at some offset into the resource using a range get for say, 16k each. The first one to complete does a pipelined request for another 16k slot and this process continues until the entire asset is downloaded. The fast mirrors would dominate, a small percentage of the bandwidth from slow mirrors would assist and truly slow mirrors would be ignored.