Advice for Running Mirrors

Mirroring the GNU FTP Server

Mirroring the GNU FTP server requires approximately 40GB disk space (as of 04 January 2007), which is distributed by the following way:

 /gnu:                12G 
 /non-gnu:           300M 
 /old-gnu:           700M 
 /gnu+linux-distros:  27G 

Due to resource and security concerns, we no longer offer direct rsync or FTP service to update mirrors. If you would like to use rsync (which is advisable) or FTP, there are at least two reliable third party sites, ibiblio.org and ftp.funet.fi, that offer access to the ftp.gnu.org contents. They update directly from us on a regular basis and you may access them with:

• rsync://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/gnu/ftp/
• ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/gnu/ftp/

and

• rsync://ftp.funet.fi/ftp/pub/mirrors/ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/
• ftp://ftp.funet.fi/ftp/pub/mirrors/ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/

If your site can also offer general rsync access for mirroring, please contact us.

We regret that we do not have adequate resources to assist mirrors in updating directly from us. Please update from one of the sites above. But if you insist on trying anyway, you can try using GNU Wget (or another free software ftp fetching utility) to retrieve ftp://ftp.gnu.org.

Tips on Updating Your GNU FTP Mirror from Ibiblio

• They recommend using -rltp for mirroring content from ftp.ibiblio.org via rsync. Using -x tends to cause client-side problems because they disable compression on their end.
• For mirror admins, ibiblio-mirrors is a low-traffic email list for sites that mirror content from ibiblio servers. Here's a link to the mailman list page: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/ibiblio-mirrors
• Specific questions and problem reports can be sent to: help-at-ibiblio-dot-org.

Mirroring the GNU Web Server

We no longer recommend creating web mirrors, because it has turned out that (a) few users can actually make use of them, and (b) most mirrors either became out of date or went offline relatively frequently. We don't want outdated information about the GNU project to be disseminated.

Nonetheless, if you wish to mirror www.gnu.org for your own purposes, that is ok with us. We recommend using mod_proxy. Here is an unsupported recipe of Apache directives for your <VirtualHost>:

ServerName gnumirror.example.org
CacheRoot "/var/cache/mod_proxy"
CacheDefaultExpire 86400 # for Apache 2.0+, value is in seconds
ProxyPass / http://www.gnu.org/
CacheEnable disk /

Thanks to Juri Hoerner for providing this Apache information.