If you would like to submit information about a mirror of Debian Volatile please observe the following rules and guidelines.
To get listed, you need to respect the following basic criteria:
Once all this is set up, you can fill out the mirror submission form.
We strongly recommend to use our mirror-volatile.sh script.
You are free to use any script you want, but please be sure to use a safe one. We do NOT accept mirrors that use debmirror or similar tools to mirror. These tools are fine for a private mirror, but not usable for full mirrors, as they exclude many of the useful files.
A well-tuned rsync setup will maintain a full working mirror the whole time. The following options to rsync (besides what you normally have) do the trick:
| Run | Options | Affects |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | --exclude Packages* --exclude Sources* --exclude Release* | You download new binary files, sources and Packages, but not the metadata
for them that apt-get uses. Also note that no delete option is
given. |
| 2 | --delete --delete-after | The second run now fetches the files excluded in the first run and also deleted all files not any longer in the archive. |
This two-way mirror approach makes sure that users with their apt-get can always fetch the files that are announced to be there (via the Packages files), even when your mirror is updating itself at the moment they try to download stuff. You are free to use any other option to rsync you may like, but we strongly suggest to use at least -lH.
Pushmirroring
A pushed
mirror is a normal mirror, with the only difference that
volatile.debian.org tells you when something has changed in the
archive. So there is no need to try a sync periodically, your are
notified when the archive changes.
A good page describing it, and some parts of the setup, is
available
on the debian.org servers. Please read it if you are not familiar
with it.
To set up your site to be pushed by volatile.debian.org, you need to add this ssh key to the mirror-user's .ssh/authorized_keys file. If you look into the key you see that it is limited to only one command. This means that we are NOT able to log on to your system with this key. There is no way for us to do anything other to your system then to just trigger the mirror — so the only harm we can do would be to trigger your mirror every few seconds, but for that the script we provide as an example uses a lockfile to avoid multiple runs at the same time. You need to change that to whatever script you use, but do NOT delete the & at the end.
As soon as you finished setting it up you are ready to be added to the list
of pushed
servers. For that please make sure you have
submitted the mirror using the standard form
and then send e-mail in English to mirrors@debian.org asking to be
added to the push setup.
Maybe you want to know what traffic you will get — or how much disk space you need. The bandwith usage depends on the users, how they use it and what mirrors they choose. We have currently about 20GB a month on volatile.debian.org. Some mirrors might have more, some less traffic.
Please see the mirror size page for information. At the moment the debian-volatile archive is relatively small compared to some other mirrored Debian archives, but as we add packages from time to time, expect the archive to grow.
If you are going to make the Debian mirror available through HTTP, please add the following settings to your Apache configuration (presuming, of course, you will use Apache), where /path/to/your/debian/mirror should be the actual name of the directory where you keep the mirror:
ReadmeName /path/to/your/debian/mirror/README
<Directory /path/to/your/debian/mirror>
Options +Indexes +SymlinksIfOwnerMatch
IndexOptions NameWidth=*
ReadmeName README.txt
</Directory>
This enables the directory indices and makes ensures that following symlinks will work. Also file names in the directory indices won't be truncated.