mirror information updated
I have received a few complaints that mirroring Debian is difficult.
The complaints have been primarily with the web pages.
First, the pages are in 2 seperate directories with symbolic links
from one (debian.org) into the other (debian.org-local). -local
contains files that are updated automatically by scripts. I was
not involved with Debian when this was set up so can only guess
why it was done this way. Because of this, the web server must
be configured to follow symbolic links. As changing it would
involve a lot of work, and mirrors only need to be set up once,
it will not be changed.
The second and biggest complaint is having difficulty mirroring
debian.org-local. This is because the bug archives have a LOT
of files and cause the memory usage of mirror to skyrocket
causing most machines to spend all its time swapping (75MB of
RAM has been reported to be sufficient to avoid this).
If possible rsync should be used instead as it avoids this
problem and can use ssh for a secure connection [1].
I have updated http://www.debian.org/devel/mirror.html to give
better information on using mirror and rsync to mirror Debian.
The only people who may still have problem after reading
that will be people trying to use mirror on debian.org-local
with insufficient RAM. A version of rsync which allows
anonymous connections should be available soon. Hopefully
enough sites will use it so everyone can mirror using rsync.
In addition, a new version of mirror which can handle large
numbers of files more intelligently will be released (this
has been promised RSN).
Jay Treacy
[1] rsync 1.7.4 uses a lot less memory. A Debian package should
be on the way soon.
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