Official Debian mirrors
Official Debian archive mirrors get an address of the form
ftp.<country>.debian.org. These are the best advertised
and most used sites; the face of Debian for most people.
The sponsors of the official mirrors are specially
acknowledged on our web pages.
Official mirrors are hosted by selected persons or groups who donate
their resources as a service to all Debian users from their country.
Debian depends on information provided by users and mirror maintainers
in order to make decisions about the mirror hierarchy. All constructive
input regarding existing or missing official mirrors is welcome at
mirrors@debian.org or at the
debian-mirrors
mailing list.
If there isn't already an ftp.<country>.debian.org for
your country, any mirror maintainer can apply for their site to become
the official one, provided it meets the criteria outlined below.
In countries where there is already an official mirror assigned,
it is still possible to set up more official sites, but only if there
is demand for such a thing. In large countries, like the US, and countries
with more than one major backbone that aren't well connected,
like Australia, it is even a good idea.
Usually, the first site will be given the aliases
ftp.<country>.debian.org and ftp1.<country>.debian.org.
Future sites will simply be given an alias of the second type
with the number incremented appropriately.
To become an official mirror, a Debian mirror site
should meet the following criteria:
- The mirror should be registered (using our mirror
submission form).
- The site should be reliable and be up 24 hours a day. The machine should
not be heavily loaded.
- It should have a decent connectivity (relative to the respective country).
Bandwidth equivalent to a T1 connection or better is preferred;
note that for developed countries, this minimum is much higher.
- The routers in front of the server shouldn't have any global
access bans or major limitations of bandwidth.
- The server needs to be able to sustain the traffic, i.e. have
reasonable limits on the HTTP, FTP and rsync daemons, including
tuning the maximum number of connections in general and the maximum
number of connections from a single IP.
- Disk space commitments (with room for expansion) — see the
mirror size page.
- The whole Debian archive should be mirrored.
- The mirror hierarchy should be available under /debian.
Rationale: for consistency between sites — you may simply
place a symlink if you want to keep the mirror somewhere else, or
set up a virtual host.
- The mirror should be made available at least via these protocols:
- HTTP (http://your.server/debian/)
HTTP is used because with HTTP/1.1 transfers have the
potential of being more efficient than with FTP.
- FTP (ftp://your.server/debian/)
FTP is the most senior protocol, and still very widely used.
- rsync (rsync://your.server::debian/)
Rsync is the preferred method of mirroring, and one of
the main functions of an official mirror is to help the
proliferation of secondary mirrors.
- The mirror should be updated with anonftpsync,
a script which provides these important functions:
- It uses rsync and preserves time stamps of mirrored files, so
that the times on files (UTC) match those on the rest of the
mirror network.
- An additional timestamp file with the name of the mirror in the
project/trace/ subdirectory of the mirror needs to exist.
This means running
date -u > .../debian/project/trace/your.server
after your daily rsync is finished.
It's trivial to set up, doesn't waste much resources, but is useful
in order to maintain a trace of mirroring.
- The /doc tree and the /project tree
need to be mirrored.
- Push mirroring needs to be set up; feel free
to contact us to get in touch with the maintainer of another mirror.
Please note that these are just guidelines, but we will be more likely to
accept your site as an official mirror if the above conditions are met.
It is also generally desirable for the site to have a history of working
as described above.
All applications for official sites, including exact information on
bandwidth consumption and any limits, should be sent to
mirrors@debian.org.
