CTAN mirror redirects (was: Re: Apple/Safari being picky about redirects for CTAN mirrors)

[Gerd Neugebauer]

> On 01 May 2019 at 11:45 Rainer Schöpf <rainer at dante.de> wrote:

[...]
> I don't think that we should ask for programmers before we know where we want to 
> go with this!

I have made some investigations. I have found the following:

- GeoIp2 is the successor of GeoIP (which ran out of support in January) and also provided by MaxMind.
- It supports IPv6.
- A free version is available as GeoLite2.
- The databases can be downloaded from MaxMind.
- There is an Apache module to read the databases.
  - It lacks the ability to do something with this information, i.e. select a mirror from the list of available mirrors.
- There are APIs from MaxMind and third-parties for a large range of programming languages -- amoung them Perl and C.
  - Perl would be the method of choice if the existing solution (written in Perl) should be upgraded to the current API.
  - C would the method of choice for writing a new Apache mod.

I will look into the second alternative and see where this leads me to...

Nevertheless this will still leave the other problems with the mirrors untouched. I opt for using mirrors with HTTPS in the redirects only. Other protocls can be offered on the portal for manual selection. Not speaking of the other issues...

>  Rainer

Ciao
Gerd