On Sun, May 2, 2021 at 3:15 PM stan via users <users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I think the answer to your question is that the variable is sent to > the mirror, so yes, a mirror will receive the flag. However, they > appear to have gone to great lengths to avoid leaking any > identifiable information. See this link: > > https://github.com/rpm-software-management/dnf/pull/1450/commits/24e6fadf03284b7892c9a7e9bc5e154c1138d854 That's correct. The flag is only sent with a metalink or mirrorlink request, which is, in case of Fedora, done centrally to the mirrors.fedoraproject.org (so called MirrorManager) server. The subsequent requests for the repodata itself sent to a specific mirror won't include that flag. There are two pieces of information the countme flag carries: 1) the age of the installation (one of 4 values, see the link above) 2) the fact it's one of the first N metalink requests made that week from that particular system (i.e. we randomly pick a number from 1 to N during the first request that week, and then decrement it on every subsequent request; when it hits 1, we add the countme flag). Currently, we've hardcoded N to be 4, based on some very rough estimation of how many requests there usually are on a typical (workstation) installation throughout a week, but it's quite arbitrary at the moment. The goal of 2) was to avoid signaling "hey, look everybody, this is my first DNF metadata refresh this week", as that alone could indicate some usage patterns of that system (e.g. when it was booted up) and thus is, in a way, user-specific. So adding this little randomization component helps mitigate this. The idea was to minimize any kind of information leakage with this flag, as Stan puts it. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
