[tex-live] Weird auto-select of mirrors

[Robin Fairbairns]

Axel E. Retif <axel.retif at mac.com> wrote:

> Almost since the beginning tlmgr had chosen as a mirror for my updates
> 
> http://tezcatl.fciencias.unam.mx/
> 
> which makes sense, since it's the closest to my location (Mexico
> City); CTAN chooses the same mirror as well. But in the last couple of
> days, the mirror selection has been totally random; for example,
> trying a dry-run from terminal I get right now
> 
> http://mirror.unl.edu/ctan/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008
> 
> and with tlmgr -gui I'm getting
> 
> http://ctan.troutlilysoftware.com/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008
> 
> 
> And for viewing Voss' Mathmode.pdf in my browser CTAN has chosen
> 
> http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/CTAN
> 
> and for the actual download of mathmode.zip it did it from
> 
> http://ftp.math.purdue.edu...
> 
> I have checked tezcatl.fciencias.unam.mx and it is active, and up to
> date: when Victor Ivrii announced to the TeX on Mac OS mailing list
> that TL and CTAN already had pdftricks 1.16, I did a dry-run and the
> mirror tlmgr chose didn't show it, but I checked in tezcatl and it
> already had it.

it may be up to date now, but mirror.ctan.org probably has slightly
out-of-date information.  www.dante.de/mirmon is a graphical front end
to the information that mirror.ctan uses; mirror.ctan gives up on a site
if the figure in the 3rd column is worse than 48 hours -- i.e., the site
has missed at least two daily mirrors.

given the problems with the dns over the weekend (it was under attack),
it's entirely reasonable that unam was unable to mirror on sunday, so it
could quite reasonably have been deemed unusable at the time mirror.ctan
sampled.

what i _don't_ know is how often mirror.ctan itself samples; i would
expect the problem to right itself within a day.

robin