	Backports.org Mirror Howto
	Backports.org Mirror Howto

"Push"-Mirroring the Backports.org Archive

What is a "Push" Mirror?

Simply said: A normal mirror, with the only difference that we tell you when something has changed in the archive. No need to go and just try a sync, you know when it changed. A good page describing it, and some parts of the setup, is available on the debian.org servers. Please read it if you are not familiar with it.

Setup

The setup is simple. You need a sane mirror script to get the archive, a sample one is available here. Copy the configuration part into $HOME/.sync-bpo.conf, where $HOME is the the home of whatever user your mirror script runs under. Modify them to fit your environment, but most probably the RSYNC_HOST and RSYNC_PATH are already correct, except you get told otherwise as answer to your mirror offer.

You are of course free to use any script you want, but please be sure to have a sane one. We do NOT accept mirrors that use debmirror or similar tools to mirror. These tools are fine for a private mirror, but not usable for full mirrors, as they exclude many of the useful files! Which basically means: Keep a full working mirror the whole time. The following options to rsync (besides what you normally have) do the trick:

Run	Options	Affects
1	--exclude Packages* --exclude Sources* --exclude Release*	You download new binary files, sources and Packages, but not the metadata for them that `apt-get` uses. Also note that no delete option is given.
2	--delete --delete-after	The second run now fetches the files excluded in the first run and also deletes all files not any longer in the archive.

This two-way mirror approach makes sure that users with their apt-get can always fetch the files that are announced to be there (via the Packages files), even when your mirror is updating itself at the moment they try to download stuff. You are free to use any other option to rsync you may like, but we strongly suggest to use at least -lH.

Now you need to add an ssh key to the mirror-user's .ssh/authorized_keys file. What file you need to add is determined by the region of the world you are in, see the table below, non-listed regions - please contact joerg@debian.org.

Region	Mirror Master	Contact	SSH Pubkey	Detached Sig of Key
Europe	syncproxy.backports.org	Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org>	id_bpo.pub	id_bpo.pub.sig

If you look into the keys you see that they are limited to only one command. This means that we are NOT able to log on to your system with this keys. There is no way for us to do anything other to your system then to just trigger the mirror - so the only harm we can do would be to trigger your mirror every few seconds, but for that the script we provide as an example uses a lockfile to avoid multiple runs at the same time. You need to change that to whatever script you use, but do NOT delete the & at the end.

Getting the push

As soon as you finished setting it up you are ready to be added to the list of "pushed" servers. For that please email the hostname and the username where the signal should be sent to the contact as listed in the table above. If there is no master for your region yet then mail the contact from Europe.

Getting listed as mirror

Simple, after the above is finished and running you are normally added to our mirror list. While you send the hostname/username to the address above please include the following information for the listing, the data will be forwarded to get included in our main mirrorlist:

Site: Your Primary Hostname
Aliases: If you are known under other names also, maybe multiple times
Type: Push-Primary
Archive-ftp: /backports.org/
Archive-http: /backports.org/
Archive-rsync: backports.org/
Mirrors-from: syncproxy.backports.org
Maintainer: Your Name <your@ema.il>
Country: ISO Countryname
Location: City

Change the paths for Archive-* to fit your layout and delete lines with services you don't have. An example for an entry follows.

Site: ftp.de.debian.org
Aliases: ftp1.de.debian.org
Aliases: debian.inf.tu-dresden.de
Type: Push-Primary
Archive-ftp: /backports.org/
Archive-http: /backports.org/
Archive-rsync: backports.org/
Mirrors-from: www.backports.org
Maintainer: Adam Lackorzynski <adam@os.inf.tu-dresden.de>, <debian-ftp@ftp.inf.tu-dresden.de>
Country: DE Germany
Location: Dresden
Sponsor: Technical University of Dresden, Dept. of Computer Science http://www.inf.tu-dresden.de/
Comment: DFN; Push-Primary

Finished

Yes, that was it. THANK YOU for offering a mirror service!

Timestamp: 17.12.2005 / 20:00:00 (UTC)