FOSS Mirroring on a budget: how a question turned into 253gbps of worldwide bandwidth in under a yea
E148 | Sat 15 Jul 10:30 a.m.–11:30 a.m.
Presented by
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John 'Warthog9' Hawley
@warty9
http://eaglescrag.net
John 'Warthog9' Hawley led the system administration team on kernel.org for nearly a decade, leading a team including four other administrators. His other exploits include working on Syslinux, OpenSSI, a caching Gitweb, and patches to bind to enable GeoDNS. He's the author of PXE Knife, a set of interfaces around common utilities and diagnostics tools needed by an average systems administrator, as well as SyncDiff(erent) a state-full file synchronizer and file transfer mechanism. He currently works for VMware working on upstream Open Source Software. In his free time he enjoys cooking extravagant meals and watching bad movies.
John 'Warthog9' Hawley
@warty9
http://eaglescrag.net
Abstract
Everyone makes use of the existing open source mirroring systems that are present to download their favorite bit of FOSS, be that Video Lan Client, Libreoffice, or your favorite Linux distribution. There are a lot of entities that donate these resources into the community from Universities, to ISPs. The reasons why entities put forth this effort varies a lot, but ultimately they all share the want to help make it easy, and accessible, to acquire FOSS.
In early 2022 Kenneth Finnegan approached John 'Warthog9' Hawley with an idea "hey we should build up a new public mirror for the internet exchange since the one that was there seems to have left". Once completed, Kenneth asked another question which set in motion much bigger things "what if we made mirrors out of $20 surplus thin clients?" which has turned into a cluster of 29 machines in a number of countries on 4 continents. This is a story of how FOSS mirroring works, the idea that was had behind the Micro Mirror (MM) project and how this helps the FOSS community from end to end, and what projects and users can do to help the entirety of the mirroring infrastructure out there.
Everyone makes use of the existing open source mirroring systems that are present to download their favorite bit of FOSS, be that Video Lan Client, Libreoffice, or your favorite Linux distribution. There are a lot of entities that donate these resources into the community from Universities, to ISPs. The reasons why entities put forth this effort varies a lot, but ultimately they all share the want to help make it easy, and accessible, to acquire FOSS. In early 2022 Kenneth Finnegan approached John 'Warthog9' Hawley with an idea "hey we should build up a new public mirror for the internet exchange since the one that was there seems to have left". Once completed, Kenneth asked another question which set in motion much bigger things "what if we made mirrors out of $20 surplus thin clients?" which has turned into a cluster of 29 machines in a number of countries on 4 continents. This is a story of how FOSS mirroring works, the idea that was had behind the Micro Mirror (MM) project and how this helps the FOSS community from end to end, and what projects and users can do to help the entirety of the mirroring infrastructure out there.