After running RPM Fusion’s MirrorManager instance for many years on Fedora I moved it to a CentOS 6.4 VM. This was necessary because the MirrorManager installation was really ancient and still running from a modified git checkout I did many years ago. I expected that the biggest obstacle in this upgrade and move would be the database upgrade of MirrorManager as its schema has changed over the years. But I was fortunate and MirrorManager included all the necessary scripts to update the database (thanks Matt). Even from the ancient version I was running.

RPM Fusion’s MirrorManager instance uses postgresql to store its data and so I dumped the data on the one system to import it into the database on the new system. MirrorManager stores information about the files as pickled python data in the database and those columns were not possible to be imported due to problems with the character encoding. As this is data that is provided by the master mirror I just emptied those columns and after the first run MirrorManager recreated those informations.

Moving the MirrorManager instance to a VM means that, if you are running a RPM Fusion mirror, the crawler which checks if your mirror is up to date will now connect from another IP address (129.143.116.115) to your mirror. The data collected by MirrorManager’s crawler is then used to create http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/mm/publiclist/ and the mirrorlist used by yum (http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/mirrorlist?repo=free-fedora-updates-released-19&arch=x86_64). There are currently four systems serving as mirrors.rpmfusion.org

Looking at yesterday’s statistics (http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/statistics/?date=2013-08-20) it seems there were about 400000 accesses per day to our mirrorlist servers.