[Support-admins] Change proposal regarding the Rubyforge distribution infrastructure - your input is needed

[Dennis Oelkers]

Hello rubyforge, hello rubycentral,

For those of you who do not know me: I am the current "maintainer" of 
the general mirroring architecture of rubyforge, running the master 
mirror and the infrastructure to push out the changes of the gems and 
rubyforge files repositories to all the subscribed mirrors.
I am currently living in Berlin, Germany, where I study computer 
sciences (starting my diploma thesis in about a year), and working for 
Nokia Germany.

In our constant efforts to improve the quality of rubyforge, we had to 
struggle with several crashes of the main (now retired) server hosting 
the website and the project repositories. At that time, we noticed that 
the webserver is a crucial component of the distribution chain, because 
all clients have to contact the main server via http, and are 
distributed to the different mirrors by following the redirect which is 
then issued.

Although the current hardware is running fine so far, we would like to 
change this in the long run. The current idea is to transfer the load 
balancing to dns, and maintain the dns entries using a modified version 
of the script which is currently generating the apache rewrite map.
This is all fine, but has one big drawback: We are not able to do 
centraslised accouting of the downloads, like we are with the current 
solution. Gathering the logfiles from the different mirrors is a 
solution which seems to be too painful to do at the moment. Abstaining 
from the statistics we are able to generate from the centralised 
logfiles we currently have, is not an option either.

This is the main reason why I wrote this mail: what is your opinion 
about the general proposal? Do you have a clever idea to solve the 
logging problem? Is there anything else that you see as a 
problem/improvable point of the current rubyforge infrastructure?

Looking forward to your replies and valued input,

kind regards,
    Dennis Oelkers