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3. Mirror of the ftp.netfilter.org

3.1 Which type of mirror? Setting up a mirror of the ftp server can be done in two ways.

Mirror as ftp.ccTLD.netfilter.org

Since FTP doesn't have a concept of name based virtual hosts, you would need to allocate an extra IP address for this ftp server.

Mirror as ftp.something.do.main/pub/netfilter

This is the common case, where you mirror our FTP directory into a subdirectory of your FTP server.

If you can put the mirror in the path given above (/pub/netfilter), we can also provide you with a ftp.ccTLD.netfilter.org hostname. If the directory appears somewhere else in your directory tree, we will not give you this kind of hostname for consistency reasons. Sorry.

3.2 Step zero: Do we need a mirror for your country?

The netfilter/iptables project issues names for mirror sites depending on the country you are located. Usually a mirror would have a name like ftp.ccTLD.netfilter.org, where ccTLD is to be replaced with your country code top level domain (e.g. ftp.de.netfilter.org for germany).

Please make sure that we don't already have a mirror for your country. At the moment we can only accept one mirror per country.

3.3 Step one: Prerequirements

rsync

The netfilter.org project offers the whole homepage directory via the rsync protocol. If you don't know what rsync is, or don't have rsync on your machine(s), we will not be able to use your mirror. Sorry.

More information about rsync can be found at the rsync homepage.

Diskspace Requirements

The netfilter FTP site is currently about 50MB in size. I expect it to grow to 150, maybe max. 250MB in the future. Considering the size of today's hard drives, I don't think that anybody has problems with the size.

Traffic Requirements

Hard to tell. As we will not use any kind of load sharing, the distribution of the traffic happens 'manually'. This means, that the amount of traffic depends on the number of users that explicitly use ftp.ccTLD.netfilter.org instead of ftp.netfilter.org.

The total traffic of ftp.netfilter.org before we had any official mirrors was about 50GB per month.

3.4 Step two: Getting the netfilter FTP tree

You can download the netfilter homepage by using the following command:

rsync -av --delete rsync.netfilter.org::ftp/ target_directory/

3.5 Step three: Telling us about your new mirror

Send a short email with the IP address of your new FTP mirror to mirrormaster@netfilter.org. We will then inform you once the DNS record has been entered into the netfilter.org and iptables.org zone file.


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