Use official HTTP mirrors instead of FTP for 1-stable

[januszm]

Related PR: #384

Change FreeTDS source server from FTP to HTTP

[januszm]

It'd be great if one of the maintainers could have a look at failing specs. Looks like the test MSSQL server is not available?

[wpolicarpo]

@metaskills can you have a look here? I'm not sure if you want maintain 1.3.x given you decided to remove freetds installation from the gem itself (which I agree).

[aharpervc]

The http archive goes down all the time as well, unfortunately (doesn't mean we shouldn't merge this, just fyi)

[januszm]

Can't we upload source files to a more reliable cloud storage or CDN? (e.g. Amazon S3, CloudFront) ?

[wpolicarpo]

We can, but there are many problems with this approach:

1. Security: How to guarantee the integrity of downloaded file if we host it somewhere?
2. Cost: After all, someone would need to pay for it.
3. Maintainers would have to monitor/maintain another source of artifacts

I personally don't see any issues in merging this, but I don't think it will solve the main issue, which is managing external dependencies and probably that's why they changed it in 2.x.

In my opinion, installing freetds should be a step of your deploy. It's more secure and reliable if we do that by ourselves than delegating this to a gem installation.

[januszm]

@wpolicarpo

In my opinion, installing freetds should be a step of your deploy. It's more secure and reliable if we do that by ourselves than delegating this to a gem installation.

I can not agree more, but it's not always easily available on certain Linux distributions, and this mechanism of downloading and installing freetds is just a nice "emergency" mechanism.

This still does not seem like a fully reliable solution, but, you know what they say: "something is better than nothing".

[andyundso]

appears to be the same change as in #384.

[andyundso]

ah I see it targets v1 instead of main. don't think we support this version anymore.

[januszm]

It's fine, for Amazon Linux I found a better solution, however it requires some manual maintenance, maybe once a year. For those who are interested, it's all about compiling FreeTDS on an Amazon Linux X (e.g. 2023), packaging it as zip or tar.gz and hosting on S3 bucket. It can be then downloaded fast (same Amazon Data Center ideally) and extracted to the target system:

commands:
  install_freetds:
    command: |
      aws s3 cp s3://YOUR_S3_BUCKET_HERE/freetds-al2023/freetds.tar.bz2 freetds.tar.bz2
      tar xfo freetds.tar.bz2 -C /usr/
      mv /usr/etc/{freetds.conf,locales.conf,pool.conf} /etc/