[Support-mirrors] tentative new gems mirror on Amazon's Simple Storage Service

[Thorsten von Eicken]

At RightScale we are constantly installing new machines on Amazon's 
Elastic Compute Cloud and the performance and reliability of ruby 
mirrors is critical to us. For this reason I've tentatively set-up a new 
gems (not files) mirror at http://mirror.rightscale.com/ which we use by 
putting a --source http://mirror.rightscale.com into ~/.gemrc

Ok, now to the "tentatively" part. This is not a std mirror due to the 
peculiarities of Amazon S3. The way I'm mirroring is by listing the gems 
directory of the gems.rubyforge.vm.bytemark.co.uk mirror every night 
using HTTP and comparing the Last Modified HTTP header of every file 
(HEAD request) with a timestamp stored in S3. The reason I'm using the 
UK mirror is that it seems to be the only one to produce a reliable Last 
Modified HTTP header. The daily update means that if you need to grab 
the latest gem a few minutes after it has been published, don't use the 
S3 mirror.

Since the mirror set-up is non-std, I would appreciate feedback before 
making any wider announcements.

Thorsten - www.rightscale.com - Amazon EC2 made easy