🚀 go-pugleaf

ian@ilm.mech.unsw.edu.au (Ian Maclaine-cross) writes:
[..] 
> We need multiple *accurate* mirrors in Australia of important overseas
> sites. If one crashes it may be only days to bring it up again by
> mirroring a local site.
> 

I never tried setting up a mirror, but I wonder if it isn't possible to 
split the mirroring of a large archive like sunsite into several blocks, 
each done at a different site. E.g  one is doing 'incoming', the other
'apps' and maybe 'xapps', another one 'distrib', etc. The main directory
hirarchie isn't really changing that much. With http, this could be
totally transparent to the user: every site has a main 'index.html'
that contains links to the appropriate site for the subirectories. 
(won't work for ftp, though).

Keeping just one part up-to-date (and backed up) should be much easier
than keeping the whole thing up-to-date, and the network load should
be much better distributed. If enough places participate, some redundacy
(and load sharing) would be possible, too (the main index is updated when
a site falls out of the system, or randomly selects a site if more than 
one mirrors the same part).  If someone wnts to contribute, he/she
could do so with comparatively small resources. 20 sites with 2 GB harddisks 
should be much more efficient than two with 20 GB.

I know parts of the archives are mirrored at different places anyway
(like here on campus), if those resources could be organized into 
some 'australian network of partial sunsite mirrors' this might work. 




> -- 
> Regards,
> Ian Maclaine-cross (ian@ilm.mech.unsw.edu.au)



thorsten

----------------------------------------------------------------------- 
       \    C                                       
        \   O                                          Thorsten Schnier
         \  M                       
     /\   \ P                            Key Centre of Design Computing
    /     / U                                      University of Sydney
    \    /  T                                                  NSW 2006
     \  /   I                      
      \/    N                                 thorsten@arch.usyd.edu.au 
    DESIGN  G                    http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~thorsten/
  key centre