Debian announces first South American Security Mirror

March 2nd, 2011

The Debian project is proud to announce the availability of the first official security.debian.org mirror in South America. security.debian.org carries all the security updates of the stable and oldstable releases.

In combination with the GeoDNS feature used by Debian, this should speed up downloads for our users in that geographical area drastically. This is a welcome improvement in the worldwide coverage of dedicated official security.debian.org mirrors, administrated by the Debian project says Martin Zobel-Helas, member of the Debian System Administration team.

Debian has many users in South America and we are happy to help the Debian project with hardware and bandwidth to distribute locally content that was previously available only in the northern hemisphere adds Carlos Carvalho of the C3SL.

Hosting of the security.debian.org service in Brazil is provided by the C3SL, or Centro de Computação Científica e Software Livre (Center for Scientific Computing and Free Software).

About C3SL

The C3SL is a research group of the Computer Science Department of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), a public university in the city of Curitiba, Brazil. The group develops both research and applications/systems with free software. At each term several tens of undergraduate and graduate students have the opportunity to learn the technical and philosophical aspects of free software by participating in several projects. Of particular interest to the Debian community is Paraná Digital, which deployed Debian and custom packages at all two thousand public schools of the state of Paraná, serving about 1.5 million students. C3SL also hosts the Debian official country mirror ftp.br.debian.org since 2005.

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>.