Re: New debian mirror at IIITH

Hi Amogh,

While your school has obviously taken a step to mitigate bandwidth
concerns by mirroring internally, along that same point if there is
excess bandwidth available to share or host a public mirror I am of the
opinion that it is a great gesture back to the community. Most mirror
systems are set up by and maintained by volunteers such as
organizations, schools, and individuals. Bandwidth, infrastructure, and
the costs to maintain those publicly available mirrors are always a
concern and the more repositories available help to share the load and
the hidden costs, and help provide towards a globally connected network
of mirrors is always for the better for everyone who needs access to the
software.

And of course, your school/organization does get the benefit of being
known as a sponsor for a mirror. I'm not sure of the prestige behind it,
but it is nice to see ones company or organization recognized even
slightly for their efforts. :)

Debian has a wiki[1] page with information and links to instructions for
setting up and joining our mirror network.

Regarding the hardware required will depend on what you plan to offer on
the mirror, will it host a single distribution or multiple
distributions? Cluster or single server as the host? File system,
memory, storage?  And more importantly the available bandwidth that can
be dedicated to running the mirror and just who will be responsible for
the mirror. There is no point in setting up an unmonitored instance that
will be out of date with no administrator to check it or respond to
issues about the mirror. So there is a good amount of stuff to think
about but none of it daunting, it's general network stuff.

Good luck!

[1]https://www.debian.org/mirror/ftpmirror

Best regards,

Donald Norwood


On 10/25/2015 08:49 AM, Amogh Pradeep wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I’m Amogh Pradeep, a student systems administrator at
> IIIT-H(https://iiit.ac.in/). Recently, we decided to set up a local
> mirror at our college as many of our students use ubuntu and hence
> mirroring this would save us a lot of bandwidth. I want to convince
> our faculty here that making the mirror public is a good idea, for
> obvious reasons, it is, but our college faculty takes some convincing
> to get anything done.
> I send this mail to this list in the hope that someone can respond to
> it with details of what exactly the requirements of a public mirror
> would be and the many benefits of hosting a public mirror. I would
> like to use these points to convince my college to make this possible. 
>
> Best,
> Amogh Pradeep
> Student Systems Administrator
> [email protected]
> <mailto:[email protected]>
>

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