| Hey Donald,
I wanted to get a rough estimate of the bandwidth consumption that mirrors in this region have. Luckily, maintenance is not a problem as we have student sysadmins to take care of that. I just wanted to get an idea of what to ask of my institute so that this may actually be possible. Bandwidth and storage space would definitely be their main concern and people who’ve hosted/are hosting mirrors would be the best people to tell me what these figures would be. As for what we want to host, I think it’s going to be just ubuntu for now, depends on what kind of disk space I can convince them to provide if in case we do plan to do this. Thanks for the advice, it has been noted :)
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unmonitored instance that will be out of date with no administrator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.
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