Daves file server for meetings. Was: [H-GEN] Multi-thread downloads

[David Seikel]

Ahh, my hook into this conversation, even if it is a bit late.

On Thu, 27 May 2004 17:10:30 +1000 Harry Phillips <harry at tux.com.au>
wrote:

> I must admit there have been times that I went there with the
> intention of a big download. Each time asked around first to see if
> anyone already had what I was after.
> 
> Like last week, and I ended up buying the download version of
> "Mandrake 10.0 Official". I even created the 4 ISO's and put them on
> the cluster host, I don't know what David did with them but I believe
> he has made them available to anyone that wants them.

All iso's that fit my criteria are stored on my cluster host for HUMBUG members to download at meetings.  The criteria are simple -

1) Must be a freely downloadable version or part thereof of some sort of unix.  Largely this is Linux distros, but BSD's and others are here.  "Part thereof" covers such things as update disks, contrib disks, and other collections of open source unix software.

2) If I have disk space issues, then I tend to remove whatever I consider to be less popular.  I recently added a lot more space, so this wont be an issue for a while.

3) I try to keep to current popular versions.

As far as I am aware, the Mandrake iso's you gave me meet the criteria (download version of Linux, popular, recent, lots of space available), so they are now available on my server.

So much for my reply, now for my rant B-).

One of the purposes of my server is to reduce the UQ bandwidth usage at HUMBUG meetings.  The last HUMBUG exec meeting was around about the time the bandwidth restrictions started.  Mark informed exec at the meeting that my server had made a measurably decrease in our usage.  So, my plan is working B-).

I do try to fill the server "out of band", in other words by using no UQ bandwidth.  I actually have no access to the Internet of my own (I'm unemployed and can't afford it).  So I rely on others to provide iso's (thanks to all who have provided them) and regular doses of non-UQ bandwidth (thanks Greg and Steven).

BTW, my lack of access also explains why I am often slow getting around to replying to email B-(.

So the more relevant stuff I get for my server, and the more people use it, the less the bandwidth limit is a problem.  I started this server long before the limit was imposed, but the logic of the idea still applied.

This still leaves the problem of keeping up with the latest bleeding edge stuff, a problem I am slowly but surely solving.  My recent announcement of the Debian proxy is a good example.  I am trying to organise people to provide recently updated apt-cache's on a regular basis to keep it mostly current outside of meetings.  I also mirror LTSP, Trinux, and SuSE update's mostly outside of meetings.  More updates for popular distros will be added as I figure out how best to do so.

I can't do it all by myself though.  I'm not an expert on all of the distro's.  For example, I should probably setup some sort of proxy / cache for one or more of the BSD variants ports systems.  I know very little about BSD though, so I will be asking around for a BSD expert to help me.  I suspect that Fedora / Red Hat is the next most popular distro, so I should do the same for those.

I am slowly getting around to organising and setting up what I have here, mounting the iso's via loopback to allow access to the files inside, writing better web pages, adding more documentation, etc.  In particular, I find that while I have to search google for the name of a particular piece of software to suit a particular task, once I have it's name, running locate usually turns up a recent version somewhere in my 240GB of distro's.  I should setup a web page to allow everybody else to do similar searches.  This is one of the other purposes of my server, it's a personal cache of the Internet for the majority of the time when I am connectionless.  Search google at a 'net cafe somewhere and find the software in my cache B-).

Help me set things up, provide iso's, but above all else, use it!

</rant>
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