Dear Admin, Servers with popular content are usually highly loaded both in terms of the I/O subsystem of the hardware and the bandwidth consumtion of the network. Due to strict limitations imposed on these factors, we are grateful for offers to mirror our directories on publically available servers for the non-commercial purpose of providing download service. If you are interested in becoming a public mirror for ftp.suse.com then please contact us so that we can arrange rsync access. We have a low-volume mailinglist for all mirror admins that has no spam and that is (almost) exclusively used to announce the availiablility of a new tree in advance. The purpose is to have the mirrors informed prior to changes that might affect the structure of the directories as well as the load imposed by (temporarily) increasing accesses. Also, time- permiting, we'll try to help with performance and scripting questions. The following are some frequently asked questions: Q1. How much space does a full mirror of ftp.suse.com require? A1. At the time of writing, about 130G. Note that this includes things that your probably don't care to mirror; specifically o the /pub/suse/discontinued tree. These are versions that are no longer supported by us. o Some of the more esoteric architectures that we support. E.g., s390, ppc64, x86-64. o the /pub/projects/ tree. If you choose to mirror everything except discontinued, the amount of disk space required shouldn't grow very quickly. For every new release there's another version added to discontinued. Q2. OK, my site just uses i386. How much space would a full mirror of just architecture take up/ A2. About 50G including updates. Q3. Can I mirror using ftp? Rsync is confusing. A3. We'd prefer if mirrors use rsync because it eases our load. Contact ftpadmin@suse.com and we'll try to help if you are having rsync or other scripting problems. Regards, ------ Sebastian Nagel & Roman Drahtmueller / _| |_ _ __ ___ _ _ ___ ___ ___ ___ _ __ ___ | |_| __| '_ \ / __| | | / __|/ _ \ / __/ _ \| '_ ` _ \ | _| |_| |_) |\__ \ |_| \__ \ __/| (_| (_) | | | | | | |_| \__| .__(_)___/\__,_|___/\___(_)___\___/|_| |_| |_| |_|