If you
curl -I http://apt.armbian.com
over and over again, you will receive a 302 redirect to what seems to be a random mirror. I am wondering how I can help add some sophistication to that randomness. As someone downloading updates from the US, it's a big exercise of patience to download at a rate of 20-60 KBps. As each package request goes to the redirector every time (since it's not a 301 redirect), some packages download at a good rate but plenty are very slow for me. In contrast, when I download an Armbian image from bittorrent, I can get 9MBps.
I know that everything here is provided for free and I am grateful! I am asking how I can help make this better myself. I have two ideas:
1) Someone teach me about the web server (or load balancer) that's currently handling the redirects... source code, documentation, etc. Maybe I can add geo-location based replies to the web clients' requests. I posted this issue thinking maybe it's the tool involved.
2) Maybe a simpler solution is more agreeable like a user picking a mirror or mirror set themselves. If this is already possible in a reliable way, I will write up the documentation page for it after someone explains it to me.
2a) Perhaps this method could be written into the armbian-config tool.
I personally like option 1 better.
A little about me since this is my first post:
I'm a long-time IT professional. I am not a developer, much more an infrastructure guy, but I work with modern systems which means I am good at scripting and configuration languages like Ansible, Terraform, and Helm Charts. I have a lot of web services and web traffic experience.
I would like to contribute to the effort of maintaining and enhancing Armbian!
Alright, excellent. I will start taking a look at the project board this weekend. Thanks!