[Haskell-cafe] Offer to mirror Hackage

[Duncan Coutts]

On 4 December 2010 16:31, Dan Knapp <dankna at gmail.com> wrote:
> With Hackage down, now seemed like a good time to push this issue
> again.  It's such an important site to us that it's really rather a
> shame there are no mirrors of it.  I have a personal-and-business
> server in a data center in Newark, with a fair chunk of bandwidth,
> which I'd like to offer for a permanent mirror.  Is there interest in
> this?  Who do I need to talk to for it to happen?

At the recent hackathon we were working on hackage mirroring.

By this we do not mean just using rsync to sync the current
combination of filestore + cgi programs that make up the current
hackage implementation. We want to make it easy to set up dumb or
smart package archives and to do nearly-live mirroring.

We have a pototype hackage-mirror client that can poll two servers and
copy packages from one instance to the other. This assumes the target
is a smart mirror (e.g. an instance of the new hackage-server impl).
We also need to be able to target local "dumb" mirrors that are just
passive collections of files.

> Strategy-wise, I think the best approach is round-robin DNS, since
> that's transparent to the end user - everything would still appear at
> the URL it's at now, but behind-the-scenes magic would let things keep
> working when one or the other site is down.  I haven't personally set
> up such a system before but I'm willing to take on the burden of
> figuring it out.

This is a somewhat orthogonal issue since I think you're talking about
multiple master smart servers that can accept uploads.

Duncan