Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Can you provide a CrunchBang Linux mirror?

I should maybe start out by stating that I am always more than a little hesitant to post on any Ubuntu planets about CrunchBang Linux, however, in this case I was persuaded to do so by Dave Walker. I guess I feel somewhat hesitant because there is a conflict of interest and I really do not want to distract from any of the excellent work going on around Ubuntu. Are these feelings rational?

Anyhow, the reason I am writing this post is because the CrunchBang project could really do with some help. For anyone not aware, I released a new version of CrunchBang last week. The new the release went well, a little too well in fact and the shared host which I was using to distribute the ISO files went into meltdown within hours of publicising the release. The meltdown was caused purely by a lack of planning on my behalf, I really had not expected so much interest.

Luckily, the CrunchBang community pulled together to save the day. Users on the forums managed to provide some BitTorrent downloads and others provided ad hoc mirrors. We eventually managed to get the files out, albeit rather slowly. Meanwhile, within the #crunchbang IRC channel, Ciemon Dunville suggested I speak to Dave Walker about the mirroring/load balancing scripts which he uses to help distribute the Ubuntu UK Podcast. A short while later, after letting me bug him with questions over the phone, Daviey very kindly offered to help out.

The following day I took out a lease on new dedicated server and Daviey set about working his black magic. As a result of Daviey's know-how and generosity, the CrunchBang project now has much more reliable means of distributing itself. The only things lacking now are volunteers willing to help by creating mirrors. If this is something you think you can help out with, please see the mirror set-up guide.

A HUGE THANK YOU is due to everyone who is helping out and providing mirrors, including; Andrew Williams, Marty Cannon, Alan Pope, Dave Walker, Ciemon Dunville and Stas Sushkov. You are all stars! Hopefully, we can get some more stars involved to help lessen the load! :)


8 Responses to “Can you provide a CrunchBang Linux mirror?”

  1. Florian wrote,

    While I sadly can't help with the mirroring, I'd suggest to add some more details to the howto page, especially how much space is needed and possibly any means to predict traffic. (Even if it's only: "we had X downloads of Y MB in the 2 weeks after the last release, with our Z mirrors we estimate this will be (XX2)/(Z*1024) GB of monthly traffic")

    Been testing #! last days, looks good so far, so good luck :)

    Would still love also know how many packages (and how big) you actually offer yourself and how much is grabbed from Ubuntu mirrors.

  2. Stas wrote,

    Thanks for the credits. I forgot to tell you that the mirror is being updated daily through a 10Mb/s connection through rsync. It is located in Romania, in Geant2 network.

    Good luck! :)

  3. Mean-Machine wrote,

    Where can I read (more) about the conflict of interest between #! and Ubuntu?

  4. udienz wrote,

    hi, i want to providing mirror for ChrunchBang. but where i got rsync address?

  5. Philip wrote,

    @Florian: Thank you for the suggestion, I will try and add some more details to the wiki page. Regarding the package list, the CrunchBang repository is located at: http://crunchbang.net/packages-9.04.xx/ - it should give you an idea as to the packages involved.

    @Stas: Thank you :)

    @Mean-Machine: Well, the conflict of interest only really exists in my head. I have not written about it, maybe I should?

    @udienz: Thank you for your interest. If you follow the guide on the wiki, the rsync address is contained within the SSH key.

  6. Mean-Machine wrote,

    @Philip: Well, I actually would like to hear more about the conflict of interest…

  7. klu9 wrote,

    To spread out the load for serving the ISO, try prefixing with CoBlitz:

    http://pupweb.org/wikka/CoBlitz
    http://codeen.cs.princeton.edu/coblitz/

    for example, this is how a CoBlitzed link to download the ISO would look: http://coblitz.codeen.org/mirror.crunchbanglinux.org/crunchbang-9.04.01.i386.iso

    That would spread the load across the many fast uniiversity servers participating in the PlanetLab/CoDeeN network: it requires no special work from you (other than addding the prefix to the link) and no special software for users trying to get the file (i.e. just use the regular browser or download manager; they don't BitTorrent or any other special client).

  8. Philip wrote,

    @klu9: Thank you for the information, the CoBlitz service looks interesting.

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