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

[Alex Mandel]

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

Geography Graduate Group
http://ggg.ucdavis.edu
Information Center for the Environment (ICE)
http://ice.ucdavis.edu
University of California, Davis