User:Susmit/MirroringArticle

Mirroring

Introduction

The most common nocturnal activity of an engineering student, particularly when exams are approaching, is to fire up a first person shooter game. Now suppose, the geek in you, fed up with all the trivialities a text book has to offer, decide to challenge your friend to a deadly dual of OpenAreana. According to murphy's law, he won't have it installed, and the Internet connection will go down at the very moment. Now being a geek, though you are sure the world is conspiring against you, you won't give up so easily, would you? You will decide to see the end of it by creating a local repository of the Fedora, so that every package is ready to serve when you want them. Of course you will be able to do it yourself, but I consider it my duty to make it easier so to allow you to take up more important duties like running a OpenArena server.

Now, having read so far, if you are not entirely sure what this is all about, let me tell you: it is about locally mirroring fedora repositories.

According to wikipedia, In computing, a mirror is an exact copy of a data set. On the Internet, a mirror site is an exact copy of another Internet site. When you try to install a new package into your Fedora Installation, either via packagekit or via yum, what they basically do is fetch the packages from an Internet site along with the libraries required for it and install it on your computer. Now softwares like OpenOffice or OpenArena are very big in size and along with all the dependencies, that is the other softwares on which this particular software depends, the download size may be in the order of hundreds of Megabits.

Now consider a simple calculation, if your institute or organisation has 100 users and each downloads OpenOffice separately, it will take around 100x150 = 15000Mb = Apprx.14.5Gbs of bandwidth. If you consider even a normal usage senario, where users occationally install new softwares and updates their system, the download can easily reach the Terabite level per month. In countries like India, where bandwidth is a costly commodity, it is hardly possible for an Institute or Organisations to invest an astronomical amount for such a huge bandwidth and this can easy play a spoilsport to the advent of FOSS.

The easy solution to this problem is to put up a server inside the institute or organisation, where all the contents are downloaded and updated periodically and users can get the software from it instead of the Internet. Considering that the cost of bandwidth inside a LAN is trivial and it usually offers much better throughput, mirroring can be an ideal solution to reduce the expenditure and can considerably speed up installations of new software or updates. It can even reduce the need of a physical media as you can use it for diskless network installations.

In the subsequent sections, I shall take you to a step by step guide on how to make a fedora mirror. Yes, it is easy, but at times it can be puzzling too.

Mirroring Requirements

Hardware

Mirroring does not cost much as far as hardware is concerned. If you are going to mirror the whole fedora content, it may take you over a Terabite of disk space. But if you are not an ISP or a big educational institute, you probably won't need all the contents available. It should be an amicable solution for most of the organisations to keep 32 bit and 64 bit repositories of last two releases along with the updates. For example, if you are mirroring right now, it would be good to keep 32 bit (generally called as x86) and 64 bit (called as x86_64) Fedora 10 and 11 along with their updates.

A server with approximate 250Gbs of Hard disk space, though the actual need will depend upon the content you want to keep, and 2-4Gbs of RAM should do perfectly.

Software

Software requirement is also minimal. All you need is an apache web server or a ftp server. However, please check your httpd version using httpd -v. If the version is 1.x or 2.0, you will need both the apache and ftp server. This is because earlier apache servers cannot handle files over 2Gbs. However, if you are using apache 2.1 or 2.2, you need not worry about this as large file handling support has been added in these versions of apache. Here, we will show mirroring only using httpd. Mirroring using ftp is almost similar and need no remarkably different configuration.

Bandwidth

The most essential requirement for mirroring is bandwidth. How long your download will take depends on the available bandwidth. Mirroring over a 5Mbps leased line may take well over a couple of days for each release being mirrored. But most of these contents need to be downloaded only once. The subsequent downloads will need much lower bandwidth, often as minimal as a couple of hundred Megabits.