Slashdot Mirror
Finding Mirrors for the evolt Browser Archive?
MartinB asks: "I help out running evolt.org, and one of the things we provide is a comprehensive
browser archive, with over 100 different browsers, some in multiple platforms and versions, going right back to Mosaic 0.4. This is both a piece of web history, and a resource that lets developers test their sites on browsers which vendors don't offer for download any more. We have an expensive problem - the browser archive chews through 140GB of bandwidth a month and growing, even though we've throttled the FTP server and restricted the maxclients. How do we find people who provide mirrors like these and get browsers.evolt.org spread across lots of hosts?" If you would like to mirror this valuable net resource, please volunteer here (or drop a line to the original submitter)
We have an expensive problem - the browser archive chews through 140GB of bandwidth a month and growing, even though we've throttled the FTP server and restricted the maxclients.
:)
For about the next day or too you can count on that getting a little bit more expensive.
I hope they find someone, the archive is pretty useful.
Look at where mirrors for things like Linux distributions are found. Many exist at .edu sites. Perhaps you could find a University to help you out.
They often have $99/mo specials, and include 400 gigs of bandwidth. That's enough you could have your 140gb covered, AND still sell/use the remaining resources for something else. So, yeah, find someone else(s) that need 260 gigs, and split the cost with them (or bill them higher and cover your costs).
Edonkey is going to be bringing out a new system called overlord soon, use p2p for christsakes.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
What we need is a good P2P system for distributing software. Something designed for distributing software packages. I'm not sure how well this would work for the example in the question, but imagine the following system:
The web site that offers the software would use a link like:
p2p://www.mysite.org/p2p/package7.xml
The above file would be an XML file describing a given package. It would be downloaded using http, but then automatically go and start using the resulting file to search for and download the actual package. The XML file would give the MD5 sum for the entire package, as well as for each 1MB chunk. A P2P network would be used to search for and download chunks based on their MD5 sum. The client would verify the sums and reconstruct the package.
Now all you need to do is get some site to share some of your more popular files.
Also here is some music. Hope this helps.
Have you considered ibiblio.org? This seems right up their alley. They have a public FTP archive that can handle a lot of traffic, and they mirror Linux distributions, among other things.
www.poak.net
... www.mirror.ac.uk, they will mirror *anything* that can be considered "useful".
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
I don't how easy or hard it is to get a mirror from them - but ftp.funet.fi has always been my favorite high speed mirror. It has been the most stable, reliable, and high-speed mirror I've used for downloading various stuff over the past 8 years or so, and they mirror *tons* of useful things on the net.
11*43+456^2
and you wont have to do anything anymore.
word.
Web page designers and web programmers would likely be two groups that could use access to older browsers for compatibility reasons. Someone already mentioned .edu's as a likely candidate for a mirror. Consider contacting their media labs in addition to the CS departments. Look for schools that offer courses in webpage design in their College of Arts.
I'm not sure exactly how evolt works on the backend, but would it be possible to let interested parties setup local copies or private mirrors?
For example,large web development companies could put a copy on one of their servers for all of their developers to access. The PHB's might not want to share their bandwidth with the world, but with it on one of their servers, you could reduce *your* load caused by those developers.
Maybe a lone developer could just set it up on their machine to run tests.
It is a really great service and I'd love it if more web developers would use it.
For mirrors, I agree with the other posters here that you should check out CPAN, php, apache etc and email the administrators of those mirrors. Universities are usually pretty good about sharing the bandwidth.
<sigh> I miss the Internet2 connections at UCLA </sigh>
<?php while ($self != "asleep") { $sheep_count++; } ?>
The UK Mirror Service (http://www.mirror.ac.uk for the paranoid) provides a lot of useful mirrors, including a nice tucows mirror.
They will probably mirror something like this.
EDonkey Homepage
ML donkey homepage (my preferred Linux client)
You may have difficulty finding a mirror willing to face possible heat from whatever vendors produced the software.
I've noticed that alot of free-to-download software comes with EULA restrictions prohibiting you from redistributing them. I'm not sure about old browsers, but I would hardly be suprised if you are probhibited from disributing them, even though they are abandonware.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Is the fact that since IE4, it's impossible* to have multiple versions of IE on a system for testing webpages. Once you upgrade to the newer versions, you're more or less stuck.
Yes, I know you can install something like VMWare with multiple copies of Windows to use multiple copies of IE, but it shouldn't be so difficult. Luckily IE5 -> IE6 wasn't that huge of a change.
Chew up a lot of bandwidth? I hear SA Net Hosting offers cheap hosting - 24 cents per gig, supposedly.
Sure, you might be their first customer, but they seem to be on the up-and-up. Look here for more info: http://www.sanethosting.com/.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
With lindows they're trying to convince people to migrate from win to linux by changing the os first, and then your apps: I believe that this is the wrong way to do so, at least in most cases.
In my opinion it would be way better to begin with apps, substituting the ones you use most with alternatives available under various OS, so that you also get conscious of the difference between OS and applications, then when you're used to write your letters with, say, OpenOffice instead of MS Office and browsing with Mozilla instead of IE, switching to a different OS can be really painless, be it Linux, MacOSX, or anything else with some decent GUI.
The only problems you can have are with some specific apps for which there aren't linux (MacOSX, etc.) equivalents (but you can use a dual boot machine for those, or have someone install something like wine or vmware on your box) or even worse those legacy dos programs that you absolutely need for your work, but that won't work under any emulator because they use some tricky direct hardware access (but then you're going to have them rewritten anyway, as they won't work on recent version of windows either).
Supporting free speech doesn't mean that you're obligated to go into your own pocket to provide everyone with free beer.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Hello, Mr. Wayback Machine. Please archive this nice plain text file called 'Mosaic0.4.tar.gz.uu'.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M