On Tue, 28 Apr 2009, Troy Dawson wrote:

> Hello,
> The distribution servers rsync.scientificlinux.org and 
> ftp.scientificlinux.org will be going down tomorrow for software maintenance.
> I will also be creating some hard links in the storage area's to save space. 
> These hard links may or may not affect your syncing.  It might even save you 
> space if you are using the H option when rsyncing.
...

<snip>

> Hard Link Area's
> 30x/SRPMS <-> 30rolling/SRPMS
> 4x/SRPMS <-> 40rolling/SRPMS
> 5x/SRPMS <-> 5rolling/SRPMS
> SL security errata <-> sites/Fermi security errata
> example:
> 52/i386/updates/security/ <-> 52/i386/sites/Fermi/updates/security/

The other day I noticed that currently when a new sl5 (say) errata package 
is released our mirroring ends up fetching it once each for the 50, 51, 
52, 53 trees and in some cases the same rpm is also present in each of 
i386 and x86_64 bits so we can be fetching the same package 8 times...

We are doing rsync with -H so I'm assuming that the rpms were not 
hardlinked at the server end (is that right or maybe my rsync options are 
breaking things...)

I did some checksums and from what I could tell the packages with 
identical names do have the same contents so I almost spent the time 
hard-linking them together at this end...

I would assume that no-one wants to use more space than they need but 
perhaps hard-linking those file would be more useful in terms of saving 
bandwith on the network for the main sl servers - assuming the 
hard-linking isn't already being done...

  -- Jon