Bug 272188

Dear devlopers,

first of all I want to stress that I am a quite satisfied user of openSuSE. I use the system most of the time on several machines and the only reason to go to Windows is when people force me into processing Word documents, PowerPoint presentaitons and Outlook. I would be more than happy if I could synchronize my mobile with a Linux group ware tool but this is out of topic here. Interesting enough there is yet another application that drags me into Windows and this is SecondLife (also out of topic here) but you might want to pass the comment on.

Anyway the real reason for this message is that I am really annoyed about the behavior of the openSuSE update service and I hope that this is the right place to put my comments. You cannot imagine how many times I told my Sytsems (on all machines openSuSE 10.2) to reconfigure the automatic update. Sometimes it helps but sometimes it just does not improve. The susewatcher always needs horribly long to see what kind of updates there are and even worse, sometimes it sees the updates, sometimes it just does not see it. It is always interesting to see which of the machines gets the information first. And this is not a matter of hours, it is a matter of days which is for security updates not acceptable.

If I actually realize form one of the machines, that there actually is an update, I try to install it. Again it needs horribly long but again even worse, sometimes there are transaction errors and just other stupid behaviour which bother people and just steels the time of users.

Right now I am in a state where I just gave up on the update service with the SuSE watcher. Anytime I see that one of the machines has a notification of availabilities of updates, I just walk through every machine and do a manual system update. This is much more reliable and I spend much less time on the update. However, I really do not understand why what does work without problems in the one case seems to be an almost impossible task in the other case.

In the end I do not understand why ZEN networks is not organized as a peer-to-peer network, for example based on some infrastructure like bittorrent which could distribute the files much more efficently probably reducing the download volume of servers significantly. If one sees a problem regarding trust and security in such an environment, one could install a white list of servers which should be taken into account. The real advantage of having a white list would be that an organization could install a private server which could serve all the local machines and I could use my notebook to literally carry updates on foot from my office to my home, reducing the bandwith that I use from my ISP significantly.

Again I know that this might be the wrong place to share such ideas and I apologizes if there actually is a better place to post them. I just would not know about how to find this place.

Still I stress that openSuSE is a very valuable enterprise. And I appreciate any  effort that you do to improve it.

Best regards,

Klaus