Re: CDN Mirrors for GNU Guix

[Tom Li]

> Woow, that sounds really extreme! Do you always have such a bandwidth,
> or did you just happen to be unlucky somehow at that time?

Welcome to China, haha.

No. Actually my connectivity is relatively good, and I have plenty
of bandwidth and being able to visit many of the U.S-based servers
directly with a reasonable speed, such as CloudFlare or Amazon CDN
(they do have local servers but still direct most users to the U.S.
due to high ISP costs).

However, apparently Hydra is not one of them. I believe censorship
is less relevant to this specific issue, this looks like a network
routing/capacity issue, as usual. People from other parts of the world
may also have similar problems.

> (Though I should say that I hate CloudFare for essentially
> preventing Tor users from accessing what they host.)

Yes, that's what we all know.

I'm not CloudFlare fan but I have to say, there isn't an  
intentional plot against Tor users because any IP address-based
firewall would eventually blacklist all exit nodes, and yes,
they (and any other large providers, e.g. Google Search) need
to work with the community to solve this issue.

For this mirror, I have switched all security features off or to
the minimum level by using a CloudFlare Page Rule.

I'm able to access via Tor without blocking by its firewall, I
don't know if it's just for my lucky exit node through.

> I'm curious to know what the cache hit rate of your CloudFront
> distribution is.
> The hit rate is surprisingly low
> (less than 5%, last I checked). It's probably because I'm the only one
> using it, though :-)

It is very low.

By default, CloudFlare seems to be conservative on caching, I have
seeing lots of people complaining that CloudFlare talks to the origin
too frequently and effectively change a DDoS into a DoS (lol). Some
tuning may help. I think it is beneficial for users even if it acts
only as a reverse proxy.  I can tweak the settings a bit after more

people started to use it.

Tom.