New machine for Debian archive main mirror

February 18th, 2012

The Debian Project is pleased to announce that the hardware behind ftp.debian.org has recently been replaced, with the help of Studenten Net Twente (SNT) and HP. The new machine is an 8-core Intel Xeon machine with 48 GB of memory and a total of 6 TB (on RAID 10) of local storage. The new server is generously hosted by Studenten Net Twente at the University of Twente, which was already hosting the old ftp.debian.org machine.

The amount of new architectures added to Debian recently and the fact that we now also provide support for non-Linux operating system kernels caused us to run short on disk space on the old machine. This new machine should give us enough space for a few years said Martin Zobel-Helas, a member of the Debian System Administrator team. Hosting Debian hardware at University of Twente has a long tradition for the Debian Project., Martin added.

At SNT, our slogan is making the net work! and that's exactly what we're doing by providing Debian with extra hosting and bandwidth in the Netherlands. SNT has been using Debian since 1996 for all of its network managing servers and other services and therefore we kindly host kassia, the Dutch FTP archive (ftp.nl.debian.org) and now this new server klecker says Tjerk Jan from SNT.

About Studenten Net Twente

Studenten Net Twente was created in 1994 to handle network facilities provided by ICTS (the IT service of the University of Twente) including ADSL, campusnet, WLAN, VPN and dialup connections to the university. Thanks to the expertise of the students manning the helpdesk they manage to offer support to all network-related problems of students at the University of Twente. SNT maintains an FTP mirror for major free and open source projects such as Firefox and Debian, and an IRC server. It also offers colocation and web hosting to student associations and other organisations on campus. All these services are maintained by a group of volunteers who use this experience to broaden their knowledge.

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.