19-04-2002: rsync access from rpmfind.net has been stopped due to bandwidth difficulties, use the speakeasy or fr mirror for rsync of the linux area.
It is located in Boston, at MIT, on a machine owned by the World Wide Web Consortium. Credit goes to W3C/MIT LCS for paying for the initial hardware (cheap) and the network access (far more expensive !), this server consumes a very significant amount of bandwidth and without W3C/MIT goodwilling I would be completely unable to pay such a connectivity from my own pocket !.
Users on the West Coast should use the complete mirror hosted by Speakeasy.Net
European users can find a complete mirror fr.rpmfind.net in France hosted by INRIA.
There is a new French mirror fr2.rpmfind.net (with the search engine) maintained by Fabrice Bellet at INSA.
It is powered by Linux. This is not a 100.000 $ machine but rather a noname standard machine assembled from various pieces, there is just more disks hooked to it than a desktop machine. You can get more informations and pictures (but slightly outdated).
It was suffering from lack of memory and poor support for the on-board IDE chipset. However nice people have sent me a couple of memory DIMMs, this improved the situation a lot, thanks to Dennis G. Allard and John D. Robertson for their donation!
Rpmfind machine has been upgraded, Helix Code bought me an SMP motherboard and two new CPU (this is the infamous BP6/celeron combination ... I had too much troubles). Maxtor also gave me 2 40Gigs drives for rpmfind (I use only Maxtor IDE drives in rpmfind). I also received recently expansion drives from Red Hat and Mandrake, but I won't be able to add them until I have physical access to the machine, beginning of August. Eazel also provided me two 80Gigs hard drives for the rpmfind servers :-).
Okay, I just go my hands on a 3Ware 8ports IDE RAID card, thanks to the nice people at Achilles Internet (they organized the Linux Symposium too, many thanks !), so I will try to switch all of my data disks off the Promise or onboard IDE cards, this mean i will shutdown the machine, mess with drives and kernels, so expect some "turbulences" during the next weeks .... Rpmfind locked within 2 days, so i decided to get rid of the BP6 and got what seems to be a stable motherboard (though of an older design) the Tyan Tiger 100. took me two hours to change the MB and get rpmfind back on-line for good. I hope I have now removed all the flacky hardware parts in the configuration and that it will stay stable in the future. Yes so far this looks stable !
On the software front I am using the journalling filesystem Ext3 . The machine rebooted 3/31/2000 after 129 days of uptime, so yes Ext3 is reliable! It's now included in the standard kernel tree so people should really try it out. |
You should see no ads on rpmfind, and as few graphics as possible for rpm2html output. I will stick with this policy as long as possible, thanks to W3C/MIT for providing the bandwidth. Anyway here is a bit of (free) advertizing for a couple of related projects:
Here is a few information on what you can find on this site:
A large mirror of various RPM based distribution (Note that this mirror is also accessible via HTTP), and the local rpm2html database generated from those..
The logs since the first day of activity of this server.
More and more distributions now provides a complete image of their install CD-ROM as an ISO9660 filesystem contained in a file. This is somewhat convenient but tend to hose the servers since a successful download will require a complete transfer of a 600+ MBytes file. I had to protect rpmfind.net against hundreds of such connections by limiting the maximum number of simultaneous ISO image download, the max is 25, please don't try to download it if you don't have at least a 100KBytes/s connection to rpmfind usually. Otherwise you are really unlikely to succeed and will hose one of those precious connection to someone who can actually complete the download. The protection is based on file permission, if the load is too high or there is already 25 ISO connections, then you won't be able to retrieve it. This is adjusted every minutes, just avoid peak hours or recheck from time to time.
It's Ok to make multiple simultaneous downloads from rpmfind.net, but more than 5 at a time won't be considered "nice behaviour" and it the load goes up too much the connections of those kind of unfriendly user are simply killed, you're warned. Also repetitive attempts results on the source host being banned access to rpmfind.
This is getting a FAQ, so let's answer this one here. While there is an incoming directory, I don't usually accept uploads of RPMs in that area, the proper way to get something installed and indexed on rufus is to upload to RedHat Contrib section. I mirror RedHat site twice a day, and rebuild the rpm2html and rpmfind indexes every morning (EST).
I provide an RPM search engine on rpmfind now (c.f. the form at the top of the page). However most people have a customized RPM based setup and their need is to install or upgrade stuff on their machine. I designed and coded the rpmfind tool for this exact purpose, have a look before asking for a search engine.
I have installed a complete mirror of rufus RPM area on fr.rpmfind.net with a local index.. Like rufus everything is available via FTP or HTTP and rsync.
There is a number of mirrors of either the rpm2html, rpmfind or FTP areas maintained independantly all other the world, I try to list them in the mirror list. Of course this is always outdated, feel free to send me updates. There is instructions on how to build a mirror.
Last point the whole FTP area of rufus is available by HTTP and Rsync. If you plan to build a mirror or a subpart of rufus please use rsync ! FTP mirroing is okay though, but in that case use mirror preferably. Do NOT use HTTP mirroring, I don't have WebDav installed and without PROPFIND, HTTP mirroring is just inappropriate. I tend to ban people hosing my HTTP server with stupid mirroring tools, you're warned !
Daniel Veillard <daniel@veillard.com>
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