Mirror requirements

[donald]

Hi!
I am interested to setup a fast mirror located in Germany for the VLC distibution. What requirements are necessary for this? How much space and bandwith does a mirror produce in a month? Ist also FTP ok, or just HTTP?

Thanks in advance.

[dionoea]

First of all, thanks for your offer to help.

Currently the full VideoLAN archive is around 8GB big (it slowly grows, every time we release something).
We ask our mirrors to synchronize at least daily using some command line:
rsync -avz --delete anonymous@rsync.videolan.org::videolan-ftp /path/to/directory

Estimating your bandwidth usage is kind of complex. We currently use a random redirection script for most downloads so users are more likely to use mirrors near them then far from them. The redirection script also takes into account the advertised mirror bandwidth. Since you're offering a mirror in Germany, you should be pretty safe from that point of view since we already have lots of European mirrors so the load is nicely spread-out.

About the protocol, we accept both FTP and HTTP mirrors although we prefer HTTP since that's the only protocol which we use in the automatic update feature in VLC.

I hope that this answers your questions. You can always setup a mirror and give it a try for a few days to see what kind of bandwidth usage you'll get.

Thanks once more.

[donald]

Thanks for the detailed answer. I've just one more question: I know that 8GB is not that much but i have to be careful with the disk space on the system. Is it also possible to mirror a subdirectoy, for example vlc/lastest/ ? Or is it too complex for the redirection script?

[dionoea]

We only accept full mirrors currently. And yeah, that's mainly due to the way our mirror redirection scripts for the website work. We could of course make it possible for our mirrors to only provide partial content ... but that's not possible yet

[donald]

Hi!
Sorry for the delayed answer. I was very busy.

I've setup the mirror but first have a look here: The most downloaded file has a size of circa 15MB.
Depending your stats i think an europeen mirror gets one hit per minute. Is this realistic?
The total bandwith of one day is circa 22GB.

That would be too expensive. :/ Is your redirection script scaleable for example to send only one hit to my host every 2 or 3 minutes? If this is too difficult or the mirror is needless with this config i have to upgrade and buy more bandwith a month and then come back to you.

Thanks.