[Ica-osgeo-labs] Proposal - University Mirrors of OSGeo

[Jorge Sanz]

2013/10/1 Alex Mandel <aimandel at ucdavis.edu>:
> All,
>
> An idea came up in the System Administration Committee (for those that
> don't know I'm the current Chair), and we'd like to gauge the interest
> of this network.
>
> There are 2 things we think ICA-OSGeo members could potentially help with:
>
> 1. Provide mirrors for OSGeo Downloads, http://download.osgeo.org ,
> current site is about 150-250 GB of data.
>
> 2. There has been some discussion to restart an OSGeo build service,
> where by people contribute build slaves that OSGeo projects can push
> compiling requests to (It's all automated from recipes). This would help
> Postgis, OSGeo4w, QGIS and a great many other projects to keep up with
> regular builds for developers and help turn out releases for the general
> users.
>
>
> Reasons why I suggested Universities:
> 1. The often have unconstrained bandwidth, so that allowing 1-4 TB of
> downloads a month is no big deal.
> 2. The often have good infrastructure and already own servers for all
> sorts of other Academic pursuits (aka not in use all the time or even 100%)
> 3. They directly benefit from a local mirror by which to provide OSGeo
> software to the local community. Everyone gets a better download speed,
> closer to them.
> 4. Our lab network has a wide geographic distribution.
>
>
> Notes, we haven't written up the instructions yet, but volunteering
> services would be self service - labs can mirror anytime, then drop us a
> note to put them into the load balance (similar to how
> http://cran.r-project.org works), build services would likely be some
> premade virtual machine to make it easy to deploy (you wouldn't have to
> leave it on all the time, though it would be nice). You will always
> remain in complete control over your server, and often would only need
> to grant minimal access to process build jobs, download mirrors would
> require 0 access by outsiders.
>
> If you think your group may be willing to volunteer some server space
> for a Download mirror or a Build slave please send me a message with
> what kind of resources you have to offer and who the contact person
> would be.
>
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Alex Mandel
>

I like a lot the idea Alex, is just like having a "campus license" of
other vendors but better :-)

It would be great to have this request on the website so we can point
to it to local groups.

-- 
Jorge Sanz
http://www.osgeo.org
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Jorge_Sanz