Re: CDN Mirrors for GNU Guix

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello Tom,

Tom Li <tomli@protonmail.ch> skribis:

> Currently, GNU Guix is still in the early stage of development, and there is a great
> lack of mirrors worldwide. For example. in my region, using GNU Guix is incredibly
> slow, the speed is around 4 KiB/s and rendering it almost unusable.

Woow, that sounds really extreme!  Do you always have such a bandwidth,
or did you just happen to be unlucky somehow at that time?

Regardless, I agree that we should have more mirrors and a wider
distribution.

> Therefore, I created two CDN mirrors of https://mirror.hydra.gnu.org/, by using
> CloudFlare and Amazon CloudFront's service. I know some have the concerns about
> such type of centralized corporation-controlled service. Personally, I have done my
> best to minimized the security risks (HTTPS only, untouched signatures) and set ip
> up faithfully. Please use it according to your own judgement.
>
> they are available at:
>
> * https://guix-cloudflare.tomli.me/
> * https://guix-amazon.tomli.me/
>
> Since they are identical mirrors of Hydra, you just need to use `--substitute-urls=`
> in order to use it.

Nice!  (Though I should say that I hate CloudFare for essentially
preventing Tor users from accessing what they host.)

I think it may be time to arrange so that mirror.hydra.gnu.org (or some
other host name?) can somehow redirect users to external mirrors.  I’m
not sure how to achieve this, so if anyone has experience in this area,
help is welcome!

Thanks,
Ludo’.