CDN is up finally!

[Pry]

Good day everyone!

I'm glad to announce that Point Linux CDN (Content Distribution Network) is up and running finally.

What does it mean for the Point Linux users?
It means that in theory you'll be getting packages from the closest (and assumingly fastest) server to you. In practice there are only two servers so far, the first one is Georgia Tech mirror in GA, USA for the Northern America and the second one is Yandex mirror in Moscow, Russia for the rest of the world. Not much but I'm sure things will get better with your help.

How does it work?
Your (Point Linux) PC connects to the cdn.pointlinux.org (this step is still needed) but instead of giving back the file as it was before, Point Linux server redirects your request to a closest mirror available.

What do you need to do to switch to the CDN?
Absolutely nothing! Point Linux repos are already using cdn.pointlinux.org by default.

P.S. Users that already have Point Linux installed will not notice the speed boost as there are no updates in PL repo so far, but it's gonna speed up the language pack download stage during installation process for the non-American users.

[gvhools]

good news,thnak you Pry

[jordan]

Congratulations Peter. CDN will be very beneficial to Point Linux as the community of worldwide PL users grows.

It's very easy to help get a mirror set up by the way. Many universities and Linux/open source friendly organizations are more than happy to host/mirror projects such as PL. It only takes a few minutes of your time and can be very helpful to PL. Follow Peter's instructions here.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them here in the forums. Thanks in advance .

[Pry]

Jordan, is the Georgia Tech mirror fast for you, cause it's slow as hell here, but that's easy to explain.

Can you please try downloading some big file from cdn.pointlinux.org and tell me how it is now?

[jordan]

Peter,

The Georgia Tech mirror is very fast for me. Download speeds are hitting my ISP's max. I realize your distance from the server but please try again. Perhaps there was an issue or they were doing some maintenance. I tried downloading from Yandex and it is almost as fast as GTlib.

[Pry]

Okay, great! Well, Europeans do not need Georgia Tech as we have a big fat Yandex mirror, hope there will be more soon. So when you open up cdn.pointlinux.org where does it redirect you?

[jordan]

It takes me to http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/pointlinux/ almost instantaneously

[Pry]

Great! So you'll be getting Point Linux updates from this mirror (if you have not changed the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pointlinux.list manually of course).

[jordan]

Yes. My Point Linux updates come from gtlib and all my sources settings are default. I haven't changed anything.

Looks like CDN is working as designed! A few more mirrors might be helpful though

[Fernando]

Hello everybody!!! I'm from Argentina. I want to thank Peter for this wonderfull distro. I like it very mucho. It has the beauty of the simple. But I encounter a problem that I can't resolve. When I try to install a package with synaptic i have very slow connection in the download, around 20 kb per second when my internet connection is around 700 kb per second. I know that CDN choose automatically the best server but not in my case. How can I fix it? Thanks!!!