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)

Comments

.edu sites

[crow]

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.

Mirrors

[Mr F J Musical-Troll]

Try asking at mirrors for other popular archives, such as CPAN, Linux distributions, and so on. Off the top of my head, ftp.mirror.ac.uk, sunsite.org.uk and metalab.unc.edu come to mind. Other 'SunSites' may be worth looking at too.

Also here is some music. Hope this helps.

Web Designers

[Sauron23]

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.

My recommendation: eDonkey2000

[Lenolium]

My recommendation to you is to use eDonkey2000, use P2P for what P2P is supposed to do. eDonkey2000 uniquely identifies each and every file on the network with a MD4 sum and a filesize. You could just put a bunch of ed2k:// links on your site to replace the current downloads, and make sure the server is running edonkey2000 and serving up those files (So that there always is at least one good place to get the files, even though edonkey2000 will go for multiple hosts with the same file at the same time). To even be more helpful, you could always connect to a specific listing server, and give people that address. At 140GB/month, you could actually bring a good amonut of legimiate traffic to this P2P network.

EDonkey Homepage

ML donkey homepage (my preferred Linux client)

Charge for the bandwidth

[unitron]

If people came to you and said "How about letting me have a copy of foobrowser 0.x on CD", you might not charge them for the software itself, but you wouldn't feel bad about making them pay for the CD itself, would you? Or for telling them to provide a blank CD-R? Why not set up to collect a Paypal'ed bandwidth fee, or get them to mirror what they download for a few days or over a throttled connection?

Supporting free speech doesn't mean that you're obligated to go into your own pocket to provide everyone with free beer.