Kali Linux: Delivery of a rolling distro at scale with Mirrorbits

Speaker: Arnaud Rebillout

Track: Systems administration, automation and orchestration

Type: Long talk (45 minutes)

Kali Linux is a rolling Linux distribution based on Debian. Packages and images are distributed via a network of community mirrors, and a redirector in front. In practice, it means that APT requests hit http.kali.org and get redirected to a mirror close-by for the actual download.

This talk is about the redirector. After 10 years of using mirrorbrain, Kali switched to mirrorbits 2 years ago. We’re going to talk about this transition, present the mirrorbits project, and highlight some recent developments that made it suitable for a fast-changing repository such as a rolling Linux distro.

We will also talk about the operational side of things, after running it for 2 years in production: how much time does it cost to maintain this setup, what kind of machine is required to run the redirector, etc etc.

The audience for this talk: sysadmins for FOSS projects, and more generally anyone who want to know how FOSS can be delivered to a worldwide audience at scale without a CDN. We also want to bring some data points for those who wonder what it would take to run a redirector for Debian again.