Provide more examples and detailed documentation

[joshuaboniface]

I'm trying to use Mirrorbits to set up a mirror system for our project (https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin), but I'm finding the lack of documentation difficult to work around. Hopefully my questions provide a starting point - I'm willing to help out here, but ultimately I think a detailed explanation of a full, production-grade setup would be very helpful here. I'm willing to document mine when I get it working. Now for the questions:

Is mirrorbits pushing data to the mirrors via rsync? It seems like it from the code, so I set up a write only = yes rsync on the target mirror, but when I scan I get no files:

 $ mirrorbits scan -enable -rsync tor1
Scanning tor1... 0 files indexed, 0 known and 0 removed
  ∟ Enabled

What do I need to do to force the initial sync? Is this a manual step?

Do I need an rsync config on the source server?

Can I use the source server as a mirror too? It seems like no, but want to be sure.

Thanks!

[joshuaboniface]

I think I've been able to answer most of the questions my self by testing it out.

1. Mirrors must always pull and initial sync is a manual step. Despite several issues referencing a "push" or "sync" command, I can't find it in the code. Mirrorbits then "scan"s the mirror via a read-only rsync command which verifies the files.

2. Since it's pull, I did need an rsync config on the source server, though I could use push rsync manually too.

3. I was able to use the source server as a mirror via some nginx trickery, basically making a second alias for my "repo" directory that did not forward proxy towards mirrorbits, and setting this as a fallback.

https://gist.github.com/PalinuroSec/f0bfb815240573ab1b0b58f3c76620d4 was also immensely helpful in setting up the NGiNX configuration.

[joshuaboniface]

I ended up writing a blog post on the Jellyfin experience with Mirrorbits, meant partially as a guide. For anyone who comes looking: https://jellyfin.org/posts/mirrorbits-cdn/

[fauust]

@joshuaboniface your blog post was extremely helpful, first because I could quickly implement mirrorbits for my organization and also because while searching for mirroring tools I found a very nice replacement for plex and I am super happy with jellyfin so far...Thanks!

Would you consider adding it to the wiki? I would like to contribute to your guide (some stuff are missing and I am not sure about the systemd unit that you proposed). So, having it here would help improvements and contributions IMO.

What do you think?

[joshuaboniface]

@fauust Sorry I missed this - yes, I'd be interested in getting it added to the Wiki here with any generalizations/enhancements as needed! Feel free to proceed, the blog post is under CC-BY-ND-4.0 but I hereby grant an exception to the "no derivatives" clause for use within the Mirrorbits GitHub repo.

[fauust]

Hi @joshuaboniface thanks a lot for sharing.
I'll try to work on adding this in the next weeks, not sure when though.