[tor-bugs] #32280 [Internal Services/Tor Sysadmin Team]: Planned change to htdocs/ directory on colchicifolium and corsicum

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#32280: Planned change to htdocs/ directory on colchicifolium and corsicum
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     Reporter:  karsten                              |      Owner:  tpa
         Type:  task                                 |     Status:  new
     Priority:  Medium                               |  Milestone:
    Component:  Internal Services/Tor Sysadmin Team  |    Version:
     Severity:  Normal                               |   Keywords:
Actual Points:                                       |  Parent ID:
       Points:                                       |   Reviewer:
      Sponsor:                                       |
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 I'm currently working on some changes to CollecTor that affect the
 `htdocs/` directory served by Apache on colchicifolium and corsicum. I'd
 like to check with you whether you see any potential issues with that
 changed setup.

 As of now, `/srv/collector.torproject.org/htdocs/` contains symbolic links
 like `recent -> ../collector/recent/`.

 My plan is to introduce another directory with hard links between those
 two directories. Namely, `/srv/collector.torproject.org/htdocs/` would
 contain symbolic links like `recent -> ../collector/htdocs/recent/` with
 hard links to files in `../collector/recent/`.

 The background is that I want to delay serving files until they're fully
 indexed and delay deleting files until a while after they're last listed
 in our `index.json` file. This all happens inside CollecTor, it's just to
 explain the idea. See #31204 if you really care about the details.

 My question is: will this new directory containing hard links pose any
 trouble on the admin side? For example, is it going to make backups harder
 and/or double them in size?

 A possible alternative would be to keep ''copies'' of served files rather
 than ''links''. But even though that shouldn't break backups, it would
 double them in size for certain. Talking about adding another 100G+ of
 disk space.

 Thanks in advance!

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32280>
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