Mirrors
Status of the contribs.org mirrors
To view the status of contribs.org mirrors, look at http://mirror.contribs.org/mirrors.
Accessing the contribs.org mirros
To access the contribs.org download mirrors, always use the URL http://mirror.contribs.org. The current releases can be found at http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/releases/, the contribs section can be found at: http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs/
You will automatically be redirected to a mirror that is current within the last 8 hours.
How to become a mirror site?
If you or your company has some spare bandwidth and would like to be included in mirror.contribs.org, you can use rsync to do something like this:
rsync -aHhimOSz --partial --timeout 300 --delay-updates --delete-after --delete \ --max-delete 1000 distro.ibiblio.org::smeserver/ /home/smeserver/
Above command will download all releases including the obsolete ones as well as the contribs section, you can exclude them by using the following line:
rsync -aHhimOSz --partial --timeout 300 --delay-updates --delete-after --delete \ --max-delete 1000 --exclude 'contribs/' --exclude 'obsolete/' \ distro.ibiblio.org::smeserver/ /home/smeserver/
If you don't have the latest rsync then some of the options may cause issues (m,h) you are fine to remove any that aren't supported in your version of rsync.
You need to enable the FollowSymLinks option in the apache config file. If your mirror is hosted on a SME Server 7.x (or higher version), in an ibay, you should issue the following commands after creating the ibay:
db accounts setprop {ibayname} FollowSymLinks enabled
signal-event ibay-modify {ibayname}
Finally, just schedule a cron job to run every 2 hours that does the exact same rsync command you do to get the mirror in the first place.
In example:
1 */2 * * * root rsync -aHhimOSz --partial --timeout 300 --delay-updates --delete-after --delete \ --max-delete 1000 distro.ibiblio.org::smeserver/ /home/smeserver/
After your mirror is synced, let us know by filing a bug report on bugs.contribs.org under the website category or by following this link . Thanks!
Figures
Harddisk size
The amount of physical harddisk size taken up by the contribs.org data will be about 30Gb, the /release tree, which holds the iso images and the repositories, accounts for about 6Gb of said amount. The /contribs tree will account for a little over 1Gb of the total. The obsolete directory accounts for 16Gb, and the testing directory which include the next version SME8 is 7Gb big.
If you are short in space you can easily save 16Gb with --exclude="obsolete/" and 7Gb more with --exclude="testing/"
Bandwith
Due to the small number of mirrors, the bandwidth routed to your servers will be in the order of 200Gb/month on average, which translates to about 80kB/s.