[tex-live] Weird auto-select of mirrors

[Axel E. Retif]

On  26 Nov, 2008, at 04:09, Robin Fairbairns wrote:

> Axel E. Retif <axel.retif at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> Almost since the beginning tlmgr had chosen as a mirror for my  
>> updates
>>
>> http://tezcatl.fciencias.unam.mx/

[...]

>> But in the last couple of days, the mirror selection has been  
>> totally random

[...]

>> I have checked tezcatl.fciencias.unam.mx and it is active, and up to
>> date: when Victor Ivrii announced to the TeX on Mac OS mailing list
>> that TL and CTAN already had pdftricks 1.16, I did a dry-run and the
>> mirror tlmgr chose didn't show it, but I checked in tezcatl and it
>> already had it.
>
> it may be up to date now, but mirror.ctan.org probably has slightly
> out-of-date information.  www.dante.de/mirmon is a graphical front end
> to the information that mirror.ctan uses; mirror.ctan gives up on a  
> site
> if the figure in the 3rd column is worse than 48 hours -- i.e., the  
> site
> has missed at least two daily mirrors.
>
> given the problems with the dns over the weekend (it was under  
> attack),
> it's entirely reasonable that unam was unable to mirror on sunday,  
> so it
> could quite reasonably have been deemed unusable at the time  
> mirror.ctan
> sampled.
>
> what i _don't_ know is how often mirror.ctan itself samples; i would
> expect the problem to right itself within a day.

I just checked Dante's mirror monitor and tezcatl (which, by the way,  
is `mirror' in nahuatl) has an age of 3 hours and was probed 1 hour  
ago, and, indeed, tlmgr in terminal and tlmgr -gui have chosen it as  
the default mirror for me.

Thank you very much!

Axel