Re: [mirrorbrain] How to tell if mirrorbrain is redirecting

Hi David,

On Sun, Oct 04, 2009 at 09:15:43PM -0500, David Farning wrote:
> Peter,
> 
> Yet another question...
> 
> I have manually added, edited, scanned and enabled two mirrors on
> mirrorbrain-testing.sl.o.

Nice!

Did you also "enable" the mirrors?

For mirrors to be used, three conditions must be met:

1) mirror needs to be enabled (enabled = True)
2) it needs to be reachable (statusBaseurl = True)
3) it needs to be known to have the file in question

You see the status when you look at the mirrors with "mb show".
Alternatively, you could search for files with
"mb file ls '*abiword-2.6.8-4.fc11.sl.i386.rpm'", which will also display
the mirrors status.

In addition, you can check the availability of mirrors for a certain
file by appending "?mirrorlist" to the URL. Example:
http://mirrorbrain-testing.sugarlabs.org/soas/repositories/2/abiword-2.6.8-4.fc11.sl.i386.rpm?mirrorlist

(As we see here, the mirror list is empty for that file, so something is
wrong)

(mod_autoindex_mb can be used as a drop-in replacement for
mod_autoindex, for its capability to include, in the index, a link for
each file to its mirror list.)

> How can I tell if mirrorbrain is redirecting correctly?  I see no
> indication in either the access or error logs.

In the (default) access log, Apache logs the HTTP status code directly
after the URL. So you see 
	"GET /url/... HTTP/1.1" 200 ...
for a request that was answered with a "200 OK" reply. 

For a redirect however, you would see a reply with 
	"GET /url/... HTTP/1.1" 302 ...
where the number is from "302 Found", a reply that comes with a Location
header containing the URL to be followed.

So to verify that MirrorBrain is redirecting correctly, you could look
into the access_log in the first place. The access_log snippet you
attached contains only "200" responses; thus, no redirects happen. (We'll
soon find out why not!)

For the record, let me mention an additional way to check for redirects.
You can look at the protocol level with "curl -sI <URL>", which will
make the server responses visible (only the header lines due to the -I).
Example (of a working redirect): 
http://mirrorbrain.org/static/images/screenshots/redirect.jpg
With a browser like Firefox, it is harder to notice if a redirect
happens.



With some Apache configuration, MirrorBrain allows logging several more
details out of the box, that complement the normal access log:

- which mirror a client was sent to
- data about client origin: country, continent, autonomous system number
  and network prefix.
- the reason why a particular mirror was selected
- size of the file in question
- files for which no mirror was found
- (with Apache's native logging means) things like the number of bytes
  actually transferred, byterange headers requested by the client or
  other headers

All these could be logged conditionally, using Apache's SetEnvIf
directive combined with "CustomLog env=....".


Here's an example for defining a new LogFormat which logs all of the
above. The format is identical to the "access log" format, but with
additional data added at the end of the log lines:

# In order to log the mirror we redirected to, we use the
# %{X-MirrorBrain-Chose-Mirror}o logging variable to log that headers
# content
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" \
%{X-MirrorBrain-Mirror}o r:%{MB_REALM}e \
%{MB_CONTINENT_CODE}e:%{MB_COUNTRY_CODE}e ASN:%{ASN}e P:%{PFX}e \
size:%{MB_FILESIZE}e %{Range}i" combined_redirect

To use the newly defined log format, you use "combined_redirect" with
the CustomLog directive of the virtual host in question, instead of the
usually defined "combined" log format.


... This won't fix the issue you are currently seeing (no mirror being
used), but it will add transparency to what's going on in general, which
is why I'm mentioning it.





> Also, I am still getting could not resolve continent, referer:
> http://mirrorbrain-testing.sugarlabs.org/soas/repositories/2/ error.


Hm, did you already update to the newer mod_geoip that I packaged last
week? With that, it should work fine and this error should disappear
with the upgrade. 

Also, the following should work:

 # geoiplookup_continent 207.118.255.6
NA


Hm^2, do you run with loglevel "Warn" or higher? When no mirror is
found, you should actually see a message about it in the error_log:

       ap_log_rerror(APLOG_MARK, APLOG_INFO, 0, r,
                "[mod_mirrorbrain] no mirrors found for %s", filename);

It should become visible if you change the loglevel to Info...
Nevertheless, it is pretty clear that no (active) mirror is found.

The failure to look up the continent also needs to be fixed, but it
doesn't prevent mirror redirects as such.

I think that seeing the output of
	mb file ls '*abiword-2.6.8-4.fc11.sl.i386.rpm'
would be most helpful at this point. What does it say?

Thanks,
Peter



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