On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 01:26:15AM -0600, Luke Small wrote: > I made a small 500 line program I call pkg_ping that calls uname -rm, > ftp, sed, on openbsd.org/ftp.html.
A "program"? In what language? Is your code available somewhere? > then it changes all the parsed http and ftp mirrors into http and ftp > downloads and changes them to non redundant http mirrors (it has to to > easily call ftp on it). It takes them and downloads SHA256 from the > mirrors and the parent times how long it takes. If it takes too long > it kills the ftp call and goes on to the next one. Then it sorts the > results and puts the winner in /etc/pkg.conf So the program basically makes several network connections to potentially some 120 servers all across the world and the "winner" is calculated based on the "speed" it took downloading a 1.9K text file from each of them? Not taking into account the number of hops, nor the anti-social behaviour of starting to download large install sets of files from the other side of the planet when a more nearby but a little slower mirror is available? > replacing all installpath instances, while leaving everything else. It > doesn't do any network stuff directly so it probably wouldn't be much > of a security problem, but because it needs to alter a root owned > file, it should need root privileges. It doesn't need to mess with /etc/pkg.conf. Setting PKG_PATH will override installpath. See pkg.conf(5). > I don't only run the release, so I don't even really know how to > pledge it. Is this something somebody would be willing to submit to > the project and maybe alter it slightly. I'm no dev and can't speak on the behalf of the project. Back when I was a complete novice I might have used a tool like this on some occasions - not knowing better... As part of the base system or the installer? Hardly... As a package? Maybe, but you would probably have to make it all yourself. Regards Erling
