Updated June 30th, 2016.
Most people don’t know this but I have maintained a mirror server for more than 15 years (FreeBSD and Debian, Ubuntu for the last 7 years).
What is a mirror server? A system that keeps local copies of requested files for multiple UNIX-like systems. Click the link above to read what Wikipedia has to say about it.
I created a DNS entry for mirrors.iphouse.net recently so that it will feel more official though it still runs on my personal hardware and storage. The name has always been mirrors.geeks.org. I use this mirror for all of my personal systems and for ipHouse maintained UNIX-like servers when I ran things there.
I did this update as the UNIX-like repositories continue to grow and it was time to increase the storage available. Prior to todays update the old server had 1.7 TiB of usable storage.
Nevin Lyne of EngineHosting (now Arcustech) recently retired some gear and donated it to the cause. Because of him I have a new server online with an upgraded 3.8 TiB of usable storage. THANK YOU NEVIN! (see below for some specs on the new server)
There are 4 repository mirrors on the new server:
- FreeBSD (i386, amd64, arm)
- Ubuntu (i386, amd64, arm)
- Ubuntu Releases (ISO images for i386, amd64, arm)
- Debian (i386, amd64, arm, was an official mirror for years)
The server supports FTP and HTTP access with rsync access coming later this summer. I am also thinking of adding HTTPS access but so far none of the repository management systems support HTTPS as a transport protocol.
Drop me a message if you need help setting up your chosen UNIX-like system to use this mirror ahead of others in your download needs.
This server is also a cvsup mirror for FreeBSD systems, you can change the repository name to cvsup-freebsd.geeks.org for your src and ports updates.
The new server is a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with 6 3.5” disks serviced by a PERC6/i RAID controller running FreeBSD 9-STABLE using ZFS.
We chose RAID6 for the 1 TiB disks as rebuild times on these slower disks can create potential unrecoverable failures in the case of a second disk failing.
The system boots from 2 OCZ RevoDrive cards with 1 bank of each physical card ZFS mirrored together. (overkill)
The other bank from each card is then carved into 2 10 GiB mirrored ZIL devices and the rest of the SSD storage used as L2ARC for higher read performance.
nginx serves as the web server delivering high throughput with very low overhead and latency.
Current usage as of June 30th, 2016
mirrors% df -h | egrep '(^Filesystem|ftp/pub/)'Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted ondata/ftp/pub/FreeBSD 320G 248G 71G 78% /ftp/pub/FreeBSDdata/ftp/pub/debian 790G 585G 204G 74% /ftp/pub/debiandata/ftp/pub/ubuntu 1.3T 923G 448G 67% /ftp/pub/ubuntudata/ftp/pub/ubuntu-releases 30G 16G 14G 53% /ftp/pub/ubuntu-releases