I have received a few complaints that mirroring Debian is difficult. The complaints have been primarily with the web pages.
First, the pages are in 2 seperate directories with symbolic links from one (debian.org) into the other (debian.org-local). -local contains files that are updated automatically by scripts. I was not involved with Debian when this was set up so can only guess why it was done this way. Because of this, the web server must be configured to follow symbolic links. As changing it would involve a lot of work, and mirrors only need to be set up once, it will not be changed. The second and biggest complaint is having difficulty mirroring debian.org-local. This is because the bug archives have a LOT of files and cause the memory usage of mirror to skyrocket causing most machines to spend all its time swapping (75MB of RAM has been reported to be sufficient to avoid this). If possible rsync should be used instead as it avoids this problem and can use ssh for a secure connection [1]. I have updated http://www.debian.org/devel/mirror.html to give better information on using mirror and rsync to mirror Debian. The only people who may still have problem after reading that will be people trying to use mirror on debian.org-local with insufficient RAM. A version of rsync which allows anonymous connections should be available soon. Hopefully enough sites will use it so everyone can mirror using rsync. In addition, a new version of mirror which can handle large numbers of files more intelligently will be released (this has been promised RSN). Jay Treacy [1] rsync 1.7.4 uses a lot less memory. A Debian package should be on the way soon. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
