[Support-mirrors] Questions on RubyForge outages

[Tom Copeland]

> Yesterday I noticed rubyforge was down, as well as gem 
> downloads.  I'm just curious of the details behind this, and 
> why the gem mirrors didn't help this situation.

Hi Chad -

It's because the gem index isn't mirrored out, so you can't do something
like "gem install rails --source http://foo_bar".  At least, I don't
think the index is getting mirrored out.  But maybe it should be.  Hm,
is that all that's necessary to run a gem server?  I think so... must
investigate.

> Was the central server that is doing the round-robin down, or 
> the whole rubyforge domain?

Just the one machine that hosts rubyforge.org.

> Also, what happens if everything is up on rubyforge, but one 
> of the mirrors is down.  Is the mirror selection algorithm 
> smart enough to remove a server from the round-robin if it is 
> down, or will people just get a failure if they happen to get 
> assigned to that server when it's down?

The latter - people will just get an error if they're redirected to the
server that's down.  Dennis has written a script to fix this; I need to
integrate it into the gem redirector thingy.

Yours,

Tom