Debian mirrors / Official Debian mirrors

Official Debian mirrors

Official Debian archive mirrors get an address of the form ftp.<country>.debian.org. These are the best advertised and most used sites; the face of Debian for most people.

• List of official Debian archive mirrors
• Sponsors
• Process
• Criteria

List of official Debian archive mirrors

Sponsors

The sponsors of the official mirrors are specially acknowledged on our web pages.

Process

Official mirrors are hosted by selected persons or groups who donate their resources as a service to all Debian users from their country.

Debian depends on information provided by users and mirror maintainers in order to make decisions about the mirror hierarchy. All constructive input regarding existing or missing official mirrors is welcome at mirrors@debian.org or at the debian-mirrors mailing list.

If there isn't already an ftp.<country>.debian.org for your country, any mirror maintainer can apply for their site to become the official one, provided it meets the criteria outlined below.

In countries where there is already an official mirror assigned, it is still possible to set up more official sites, but only if there is demand for such a thing. In large countries, like the US, and countries with more than one major backbone that aren't well connected, like Australia, it is even a good idea.

Usually, the first site will be given the aliases ftp.<country>.debian.org and ftp1.<country>.debian.org. Future sites will simply be given an alias of the second type with the number incremented appropriately.

Criteria

To become an official mirror, a Debian mirror site should meet the following criteria:

• The mirror should be registered (using our mirror submission form).
• The site should be reliable and be up 24 hours a day. The machine should not be heavily loaded.
• It should have a decent connectivity (relative to the respective country). Bandwidth equivalent to a T1 connection or better is preferred; note that for developed countries, this minimum is much higher.
• The routers in front of the server shouldn't have any global access bans or major limitations of bandwidth.
• The server needs to be able to sustain the traffic, i.e. have reasonable limits on the HTTP, FTP and rsync daemons, including tuning the maximum number of connections in general and the maximum number of connections from a single IP.
• Disk space commitments (with room for expansion) — see the mirror size page.
• The whole Debian archive should be mirrored.
• The mirror hierarchy should be available under /debian. Rationale: for consistency between sites — you may simply place a symlink if you want to keep the mirror somewhere else, or set up a virtual host.
• The mirror should be made available at least via these protocols:
  • HTTP (http://your.server/debian/)
    HTTP is used because with HTTP/1.1 transfers have the potential of being more efficient than with FTP.
  • FTP (ftp://your.server/debian/)
    FTP is the most senior protocol, and still very widely used.
  • rsync (rsync://your.server::debian/)
    Rsync is the preferred method of mirroring, and one of the main functions of an official mirror is to help the proliferation of secondary mirrors.
• The mirror should be updated with ftpsync, a script which provides many required functions.
• Push mirroring needs to be set up; feel free to contact us to get in touch with the maintainer of another mirror.

Please note that these are just guidelines, but we will be more likely to accept your site as an official mirror if the above conditions are met. It is also generally desirable for the site to have a history of working as described above.

All applications for official sites, including exact information on bandwidth consumption and any limits, should be sent to mirrors@debian.org.

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