After many years the whole RPM Fusion repository has grown to over 320GB. There have been occasional requests to move the unsupported releases to an archive, just like Fedora handles its mirror setup, but until last week this did not happen.

As of now we have moved all unsupported releases (EL-5, Fedora 8 - 25) to our archive (http://archive.rpmfusion.org/) and clients are now being redirected to the new archive system. The archive consists of 260GB which means we can reduce the size mirrors need to carry by more than 75%.

From a first look at the archive logs the amount of data requested by all clients for the archived releases is only about 30GB per day. Those 30GB are downloaded by over 350000 HTTP requests and over 98% of those requests are downloading the repository metdata only (repomd.xml, *filelist*, *primary*, *comps*).

RPM Fusion's mirrorlist server which are returning a list of (probably, hopefully) up to date mirrors (e.g., http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/mirrorlist?repo=free-fedora-rawhide&arch=x86_64) still have been running on CentOS5 and the old MirrorManager code base. It was running on two systems (DNS load balancing) and was not the most stable setup. Connecting from a country which has been recently added to the GeoIP database let to 100% CPU usage of the httpd process. Which let to a DOS after a few requests. I added a cron entry to restart the httpd server every hour, which seemed to help a bit, but it was a rather clumsy workaround.

It was clear that the two systems need to be updated to something newer and as the new MirrorManager2 code base can luckily handle the data format from the old MirrorManager code base it was possible to update the RPM Fusion mirrorlist servers without updating the MirrorManager back-end (yet).

From now on there are four CentOS7 systems answering the requests for mirrors.rpmfusion.org. As the new RPM Fusion infrastructure is also ansible based I added the ansible files from Fedora to the RPM Fusion infrastructure repository. I had to remove some parts but most ansible content could be reused.

When yum or dnf are now connecting to http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/mirrorlist?repo=free-fedora-rawhide&arch=x86_64 the answer is created by one of four CentOS7 systems running the latest MirrorManager2 code.

RPM Fusion also has the same mirrorlist access statistics like Fedora: http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/statistics/.

I still need to update the back-end system which is only one system instead of six different system like in the Fedora infrastructure.

Having read about using syslinux as a boot-loader for virtual machines I tried to replace grub2 on one of the Fedora 24 virtual machines I am using with syslinux:

Not completely knowing what to do I did:

• dnf install syslinux-extlinux.x86_64
• /sbin/extlinux --install /boot/extlinux/

The I tried to create a configuration file using grubby:

• grubby --extlinux --add-kernel=/boot/vmlinuz-4.4.6-300.fc23.x86_64 --title="4.4.6" --initrd=/boot/initramfs-4.4.6-300.fc23.x86_64.img --args="ro root=/dev/sda3"

Which resulted in:

# cat /etc/extlinux.conf 
label 4.4.6
 kernel /vmlinuz-4.4.6-300.fc23.x86_64
 initrd /initramfs-4.4.6-300.fc23.x86_64.img
 append ro root=/dev/sda3

I added following lines to the file manually:

default 4.4.6
ui menu.c32
timeout 50

After that I rebooted and the virtual machine was still using grub2 to load the kernel.

To write syslinux to the MBR following additional command was required:
dd if=/usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda bs=440 count=1. I was a bit nervous rebooting the system after overwriting the MBR, but it rebooted successfully. The configuration file was also correctly updated after I installed a new kernel via dnf. I also removed grub2 (dnf remove grub2*) and was able to successfully reboot into the new kernel without grub2.

After running RPM Fusion's MirrorManager instance for many years on Fedora I moved it to a CentOS 6.4 VM. This was necessary because the MirrorManager installation was really ancient and still running from a modified git checkout I did many years ago. I expected that the biggest obstacle in this upgrade and move would be the database upgrade of MirrorManager as its schema has changed over the years. But I was fortunate and MirrorManager included all the necessary scripts to update the database (thanks Matt). Even from the ancient version I was running.

RPM Fusion's MirrorManager instance uses postgresql to store its data and so I dumped the data on the one system to import it into the database on the new system. MirrorManager stores information about the files as pickled python data in the database and those columns were not possible to be imported due to problems with the character encoding. As this is data that is provided by the master mirror I just emptied those columns and after the first run MirrorManager recreated those informations.

Moving the MirrorManager instance to a VM means that, if you are running a RPM Fusion mirror, the crawler which checks if your mirror is up to date will now connect from another IP address (129.143.116.115) to your mirror. The data collected by MirrorManager's crawler is then used to create http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/mm/publiclist/ and the mirrorlist used by yum (http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/mirrorlist?repo=free-fedora-updates-released-19&arch=x86_64). There are currently four systems serving as mirrors.rpmfusion.org

Looking at yesterday's statistics (http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/statistics/?date=2013-08-20) it seems there were about 400000 accesses per day to our mirrorlist servers.