Re: Manuals and Spiders

> *Automatic* Mirrors based on the IP address is possible, but it opens up > its own can of worms. We have already had a discussion about automatic > mirroring on this list. In fact, I had stated earlier that we can > provide the ip-country database free for php, all its mirrors and any > other open source intiatives related to the php group. The offer is > still open to use our product - www.ip-to-country.com . We can also put > in some programming resources to help php and its mirrors deploy an > automatic mirror soln. > > The main issue that were unresolved at tht time was - wht if the mirror > site is down at tht point of time - then the visitor would keep getting > redirected there. We would need addional code to be written which will > check all the mirrors every 'x' minutes. I don't know of any better soln > to this as yet. > > That's as far as the mirroring is concerned, which is a very good idea > and I had had tried to push this earlier too. Well, first it should only be used to recommend a better mirror site, and to make the local mirror site appear first in download mirror listings. This service can do no harm this way, and we can move on to automatic redirection, if things seem to be working well... It is true that we have an existing geoip code to handle the geoip database, but we have no geoip database currently (or at least I don't know of any). It should also be noted, that I don't have access to rsync.php.net. I would be quite happy to set up either the ip-to-country or the geoip databases, but I am unable to. If nothing else will be done, then I can only commit the file[s] into CVS, and update there regularly, but that is not really an ideal way to solve this problem.... BTW ip-to-country seems to be more open as we would be free to distribute the database via rsync to our mirror sites. If we go on the ip-to-country way however, then we need to find out, whether it is quick enough to search in a single CVS file with PHP, or we need to split the file into segments, and select the target file first based on the IP, and then search for the country info... Speed tests are needed... Goba