[Wylug-discuss] The Linux Mirror Project (fwd)

[Jim Jackson]

for info.......

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 20:38:30 +0000
From: Life <life at tlm-project.org>
Subject: The Linux Mirror Project



Hello,

Myself and a fellow Linux enthusiast (supported by some members of our
community) have recently launched a new website over at http://
www.tlm-project.org (The Linux Mirror Project).

We have noticed after downloading many distributions that many mirror servers
used to provide Linux ISO images and distributions have a tendancy to max out
at about 5k/s, and thus, it can take a long time to download a new
distribution.

Our goal is to create a network specifically to mirror the major Linux
distributions and related material and hopefully serve out files at a decent
speed. We will be using the often overlooked BitTorrent protocol to
distribute these files, as this way, we dont have to rely too heavily on one
centralized server and therefore will be relatively free of bandwidth
limitations and any potential problem with server downtime.

In case you are not familiar with the BitTorrent network, it works with the
original host "seeding" out the file(s) to a few hosts, once these hosts
start downloading and other hosts connect, the downloading users begin
seeding chunks of their download out to hosts who require them, distributing
the bandwidth very quickly and taking the load away from the original
seeders. You soon end up with a large amount of users sharing chunks of
these files between them, getting their download completed alot quicker than
your average FTP / HTTP server.

Now, although this is an ambitious project, the people behind it are
devoted and driven to making it succeed, but we are still appealing for all
the help we can get.  Gentoo have already responded, along with a few small
bandwidth providers and have expressed that they wish to help us with this,
we will be talking with them all in the next week or two.

We have a leased line to our server, but it is also used to host some
community websites and projects, so any extra bandwidth that could be spared
by an individual / organisation for any period of time would be greatly
welcomed. The success of this project relies heavily on the Linux community,
as we can only achieve so much alone.

We are a completely non-profit organisation, we have no advertising banners
or pop ups on our homepage, we just want to provide a good service to a great
community that has already given us so much. We are hoping you could
help us out in generating some interest in this project.

Also, If your organisation, or any of your administration can donate any
spare bandwidth to this cause no matter how small amount, even only for a
limited time, we would be very appreciative and make sure your site is linked
from our homepage.

If you require anymore details or have any feedback to add,
please do not hesitate to contact me on this address, or contact Matt:
Matt at tlm-project.org.

Thanks for your time.

Ross.
TLMP Admin.


P.S.  Please note, that at this present time, our HTTP server is under a fair
amount of strain from users checking out the site, and as most of our
bandwidth is being dedicated to seeding out the distribution ISO's, it may
load slowly.  This is a temporary problem, we are looking into increasing the
bandwidth and should be resolved soon.