martin f krafft wrote: > Dear mirrors team, > > The ETH Zurich has sent you an offer for an additional primary > mirror on 1 June 2005. This offer has remained unanswered up until > the present day (unless I've been purposely left out of the loop). > In combination with their offer to host ftp.debian.org which also > remained unanswered for long[0], this is not exactly motivating for > the ETH (or any other similar institution) to volunteer resources in > the future. Having talked this issue over with a few people at DebConf5, the situation is that unless we totally fail to get any decent offers in the USA, then ftp-master.d.o (and hence ftp.d.o, which is preferably located in the same rack with a dedicated interlink) will remain in the USA. This is because the current export regulations from the USA require all crypto software to be notified to the authorities. It seems that when a new package is uploaded, regardless of what it might be, we inform them of the package name, and that it may now, or in the future, contain crypto. This (admittedly silly) procedure has apparently been adopted by them as the shining example of how to do it right. If we moved ftp-master out of the USA, then the initial export might either be from the developers machine (if they're in the USA) or from the first mirror that grabs a copy, and then allows a non-US client to download it. It's possible that we could persuade the relevant authorities that this was a logically equivalent situation, but doing so would require more lawyer-time, and would lose the current advantage we have of having a letter saying "we use your procedures as an example for other applicants who enquire about how to do this" which is pretty much a bullet proof defence if they were to try and decide that we had broken the rules at some point in the future. I know it makes no sense, but that's the law for you ;-) That said, if we can find machine(s) to put on that network, I'm sure we'd like to take the offer up, but it's not going to be a case of it happening this week, and it won't be ftp-master unless we fail to get a single decent offer in the USA. Cheers, Phil.
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