Setting up a mirror

If you want to set up a mirror of OpenVZ downloads, here's how.

Requirements

Warning: Please do NOT set up public OpenVZ mirror if: you don't have enough resources (disk space, bandwidth, admin staff); you are not committed to maintaining it for at least years; you do not have automatic monitoring in place and staff to fix it quickly.

• The mirrored contents should be available through HTTP and FTP; both are optional but of course at least one should be there. In addition, you might provide rsync access — this is highly optional.

• Your http/ftp servers should return correct status for non-existent files (HTTP 404, FTP 550).

• Your mirror should be updated on a regular basis; 1 hour period is recommended.

• Your should have some monitoring in place to check that your mirror is
  • serving the files using all the protocols it supports
  • updated periodically

If you can not set up a system conforming to the above requirements — please don't attempt it.

Setting up the mirroring process

To initially mirror the contents, run

rsync -av --delete rsync://download.openvz.org/openvz-download /local/path

Next step is to add the cron job to run the same rsync command regularly. It is suggested to do that at least hourly.

Setting up an access to your mirror

When you are ready to open up your mirror, set up HTTP/FTP access to it. Preferrably, the mirror should be available at http://openvz.yoursite.com/ or http://mirrors.yoursite.com/openvz/ (same with ftp).

Announcing your mirror

Final step is to announce the mirror by sending an email to mirrors@openvz.org. It should contain at least the following information:

• physical location of your site (country, state/province, city);
• frequency of updates;
• URL(s) to access the mirror;
• Email address of mirror admin (whom to contact in case of problems). It will better be some generic address (like mirroradmin@ or something), forwarded to at least a few people.

Some stats

OpenVZ download site is about 152GB now (as of Sept 2014), so your mirror will need at least the same space. It is growing at about 3 GB per month.

The traffic for download.openvz.org is about 3T to 15T per month; it should be much lower than that for your mirror.

See also

• Download mirrors