Re: Mirrors not allowing Directory Listings

On 14.06.21 08:22, Carsten Otto wrote:
>I'm one of the admins of ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de, which currently
>serves as ftp2.de.debian.org.
>
>In addition to your question (I'm also interested in guidelines), here's
>a bit of background information:
>
>We disabled directory listing for the pool/ subdirectory, mostly because
>it contains a lot of files. This might cause higher load, especially if
>someone decides to crawl the directory. Furthermore, which is due to our
>(mis?)configuration, directory indexes are not cached, but instead
>generated by a slow backend server.
>
>Some people decided to download whole distributions via HTTP(s),
>although we offer rsync access. Disallowing directory listing helps to
>discourage this.

the page
https://www.debian.org/mirror/ftpmirror#settings

recommends enabling of directory listings, but it's not requirement. 

I agree with OP that mirrors should provide listings, although (sane)
bandwidth/rate limiting could be acceptable and DoS protection as well.