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Call for mirrors! (And a big thank you to Liam)

Liz: Here’s a post from Liam Fraser, who you may recognise from the forums, or for his Python tutorials on YouTube. I’ve bent his arm into administering our downloads server for us, and he has, as usual, gone above and beyond what we’d briefed him to do.

Liam’s tutorial video series is becoming very popular, and he’s paying a lot of attention to what you are saying in the forums and blog comments here. Because some readers have said they’re struggling a bit with making SD card images, he’s planning on a video tutorial to show you how to do it step-by-step before we launch the device itself. Head over and subscribe to his channel – we think you’ll get a lot out of it.

We had email the other day from someone complaining that a naked Jennifer Anniston had been seen on YouTube in a “recommended for you sidebar” near one of Liam’s videos. Now, obviously, the Foundation can’t police YouTube’s algorithmic choice of what it thinks you might like, and we don’t police community-created videos like Liam’s. I’m just putting it out there; we thought this might be the sort of information some of you would like to know…

Over to Liam.

I’m Liam Fraser, the guy who is administering the Raspberry Pi Downloads server. As many of you will know, the release of the Debian 6 image on Friday went extremely smoothly. We still have around 2000 seeders on our torrent which is fantastic. Even more impressive than that was the number of mirror links that were generously donated by the community.

I’m sure many of you saw the dreaded ‘capacity full’ message when trying to download via http. Over the past few days I’ve been working on a load balancing system for our server so we can fairly distribute our http traffic amongst the mirrors.

The system takes client location, mirror location and server bandwidth into consideration when assigning a mirror. A server with a gigabit connection would have more chance of being assigned to a user than a server with a 100 megabit connection. A user can also select an alternative mirror if there is an issue with the automatically assigned mirror.

However, I can’t just start putting links from those who have kindly entered their mirror details on the wiki into the load balancer because it would be unfair on those people hosting to have to deal with such a traffic surge.

So, if you’d like to become a trusted mirror to be used with our load balancer, email raspberrypimirrors@gmail.com with the following information:
• The http path to your mirrors Raspberry Pi root folder
• An FTP Login with password for your Raspberry Pi root folder
• Server speed (100 megabit, gigabit, etc.)
• Continent/Country of the server
• Logo / link / text such as “This mirror is hosted by webfusion.”

Any mirror that provided us with this information would automatically have new images pushed to their web root via FTP and would not have to worry about being up to date.

Edited to add: I’ll be setting up an rsync server as an alternative to FTP for all the linux guys as they’ve all asked for it in the comments below.

Liz has asked if data on how many downloads are made from the trusted mirrors can be given to the Foundation, so they can make estimates about how many Raspberry Pis they will need to produce, so you’ll be helping out in more than one way.

It’s worth pointing out that that we’re expecting a large amount of traffic and that we cannot be held accountable for exceeding your bandwidth allowance. However, any mirror wanting to be removed from the list could easily do so by emailing me.

Thanks all!

124 comments

Problems mounting the image? You can mount the root partition of the image via loop device and explore the image:
mount -o loop,offset=80740352 /path/to/debian6-17-02-2012.img /mnt/target

Hope this helps some of you ;)

For those who are interested in finding those offsets, you can run:

(in bash) parted debian6-17-02-2012.img
(in parted) unit b
(in parted) print

The offset for each partition is under the “Start” column (without the final ‘B’ of course :D).

She isn’t naked, I’ve checked. I will be seeding on the torrent, I doubt that a 100Mbit mirror in northen Sweden would do so much difference anyway.

Are you into Judo or similar Liz? You seem to be torturing quite some people’s limbs. ;)

I’m wondering if a CDN like Cloudflare would cache tar/zip files to prevent exceeding the bandwidth allowance.

Forget it, I’ve just read it’s against the terms and conditions.

Want to help but have no server with FTP accounts and so on… Sorry…
But will keep seeding on the torrent anyway!
Hope this helps a little…

Sent, every bit helps for the greater community.

Are there any alternatives to FTP?
FTP is very insecure. I would not have FTP server installed on my server.
Maybe rsync or something of that nature.

I thought the same. I’d offer SFTP (SSH) access.

Liam (ever reactive) is currently working on an rsync server as an alternative for those of you who don’t want to use FTP – I’ve just edited the post to reflect this.

Likewise, I would be happy to provide an rssh account with sftp/scp/rsync, but basic FTP is a no-go.

same here!

I am willing to provide SSH/SCP access to my server. (OVH France)

Seeding hoping for God will help me get a Raspberry PI from the first batch :D

I’m also happy to mirror but not at the cost of installing FTP on my server.

Is it possible to “donate” bandwidth via BitTorrent? Maybe using an RSS Feed to the newest files? That could help a lot!

Whats the problem with the torrent? ive been seeding it since it was released @ 100mb

Some people are behind ISPs which throttle torrents, or on a network (universities etc.) which don’t allow torrents at all.

Personally, I have no problems with using torrent at all (and I understand it’s not the torrent technology in itself that’s illegal, but certain things people share through it). But torrent-downloading can sometimes be slow, not to mention the fact you also need to “seed” what they are downloading to get a decent download speed.

Many ISPs block torrent, and torrent software is blocked on many places. So although I’m not against torrent, I believe plain old HTTP download should be available as well (and for people on flaky connections like mine, HTTP and FTP are MUCH faster).

Raspberries on my pancakes this evening, I think.

I’d love to help you by providing a mirror, but sorry, I can’t :(
I setup a mirror page on my server (at home) mirror.psd-center.info/rpi and put the information onto the elinux-community-page.
About one hour later my internet was really slow and I couldn’t even access any webpage. I wondered and soon I thaught of my mirror.
I tried to connect to elinux in order to remove my link, but it didn’t work. So I had to login to my PuTTY and stop apache (what also stopped all my other sites). I went to elinux, removed my link, changed the server script so it tells the visitors, that this server is down and finally renamed the img-file. :)

Greetz,
benni

The reason Liam’s working on this load balancer is to prevent that sort of thing happening – it looks like you were getting more than your fair share of traffic!

If the systems works, I’d love to provide you my sever as a mirror.
As soon as your system is finished, I’ll sign my server up again :)

Greetz,

I already spent over 500GB of Traffic by mirroring the zip file.

And it gets more every second ;)

Even with the load balancer I think between often limited bandwidth and often dynamic IPs (leaving a window where a hostname could potentially point at the wrong server) that having official mirrors on home servers is not a very good idea.

A big thanks to all those who can and do give their servers over to mirroring and Liam for the hard work, unfortunately I don’t have the up bandwidth to help.
I will be scanning the related YouTube links, they sound interesting! ;)

I would like to help mirroring, and in fact I had just added my mirror URL to the list in the wiki, when I saw this post. My servers are not the best (but enough for file downloading) and the connection is not lightning fast (100mpbs on both I believe), and I’m only allowed 1TB of bandwidth per month on each (so I can provide about 3000 downloads or a 700MB file, 1500 downloads on each server).
I’m a bit sad I can provide everything (under the limits I mentioned) except the FTP login – I’m not going through the hassle of setting up a FTP server and configuring it.

So it seems one of my servers (the “lithium” called one) will keep being an “unofficial Raspberry Pi downloads mirror”, allowing 1500 downloads a month, which, who knows, may be handy to someone, one day in the future :)

It would be handy if the load balancer could keep track of how many visitors it’s sent to a site and cap it, so a mirror could be handed those 1500 downloads and then not get sent any more traffic for the month.

Of course, that would involve a load more work for Liam so it might not be practical…

Indeed, I think that would be the best approach. But let’s not over-overload Liam with more work ;)

I already sent an email to the address on the blog post, but I haven’t received a reply yet. Not a surprise though, I guess everyone directly involved with the project is very busy right now… and plus, there are certainly mirrors better than mine so I don’t really expect an answer :)

I see there is only one mirror on Portugal, and despite being Portuguese, I can’t find an affordable VPS on my country and my home connection is nowhere good to host a home server, so I won’t be able to setup another Portuguese mirror.

I think he’s already got dozens of emails sent to that address to deal with, so he’s not able to answer instantly. Patience, young Padawan!

Over 50k downloads – and a release of < 10k dev boards.

Great.

I haven’t downloaded yet, so its 50,000 + 1

Where did you get the 50k number from?
(only 9906 via torrent, I don’t see any http results yet)

I would just like to thank Liam , and the others like him , who are donating there time an effort in helping the whole raspi community. i made a post a week or 2 ago asking if people like this can be given the heads-up on sales http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum?forum=all&value=4212&type=9&search=1
as they offer an awful lot more than your average user can to the project, however my post was interpretered as being written by a dodgy alias , seems like genuine sincerity is wasted here , nevertheless , sincere thanks to liam for all the hard work , well done mate , you will do well in life !!!

I think we’ll be making sure that Liam gets a little more than a heads-up on sales as a thank you for all his work. ;)

nice one Liz , young guy like that taking on all this aswell as his studies , the lad deserves a huge thank you from whole RPi community

I’m extending my help beyond seeding the torrent.
Email sent.

We’re blown away at how generous the community is being; thank you so much.

Mailed, offering a small but a gigabit connected server I’m not using :-)

the Foundation can’t police YouTube’s algorithmic choice

There are alternative hosts too, e.g. the Internet Archive’s Moving Image Archive.

Email sent, been in contact with 3 people at various ISP’s 2 replies so far seem positive, the rsync mirror to pull from will be a massive step in the right direction.

Looking forward to seeing the first batches!

Naked picture of Jennifer Aniston ???

Noo….

I just looks that way from the small preview.

I checked ;)

i actually got to the raspberry pi tutorial from de jennifer aniston video

E-Mail sent. I seeded the torrent for a while but once there were 1000+ seeders it didn’t seem worthwhile on my little connection :) I’m surprised that the http mirrors are getting hammered but I guess you’re right about some universities/ISPs etc blocking torrent/p2p traffic.

Another email sent for providing some FTP hosting goodness :-)

Seeding the torrent and eagerly awaiting the RPi’s arrival in the shop :)

Cracked port forwarding on my network so able to get incoming connections to the client (the secret to good downloading/uploading) been seeding and getting a few hits. Surprised that http got hit hard but then bit torrent clients can be troublesome to set-up and slow to get running also some networks don’t allow that type of traffic as stated above.
It took mine about 8hrs to download the first image not quite the time everyone expects from the up to 40Mb/s connection speed splurged about on TV and the in press. That’s just how it’s works, slow and reliable if we can keep up seeders number at the same level as the downloads 9779 as reported by my client, we should be able to provide backup for the Mirrors, FTP, HTTP etc
When will you post the next image file?
Lets see how that one works out. Also will you be adding extra trackers to the raspberry pi tracker as that could help build the network? :-)

Added mirror to the wiki yesterday, will email you with a “proper” mirror for the loadbalancer later this week. (Will have to setup a new one.)

Dear Sir or Madam,
I feel compelled to complain about the “NUDIE” pictures on the “recommended for you” sidebar on “Your Tube”. I was APPALLED to discover that EVERY single ONE of the people on my sidebar was fully clothed. Some even sported hats and galoshes. I am disgusted by your bait and SWITCH tactics! If you think this will make me buy one of your circuit BOARDS then you are mistaken. Do not reply – your excuses will NOT WASH with me.

–Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells

Right, because the R.Pi team and YouTube channels fully control the advertisements that you will see on websites..

Em – Scep’s joking, Marc. We Brits are a sarcastic bunch, and I know this is not how humour necessarily works in other cultures, but I would have hoped the galoshes would have tipped you off!

Liz, you’re right. I was rather tired* when I first read that and it went right over my head without a smiley or two. Brits have a great sense of humor but I admit that I sometimes need to “tune in” to it a bit. :)

Sorry Scep!

* Even when I can barely keep my eyes open I’m still checking this site, love what the team is doing! The Beeb was the first computer I worked with (second in our house, my father put together a NASCOM kit before the Beeb) and it was the start of my IT carrier.

Thanks to games like Repton and Chuckie Egg.. and “Speech!” by Superior Software I can now say that I’m a scientific programmer. :D

Joking aside, it would be good if the videos could be embedded perhaps on a seperate page of the site to avoid children seeing things they shouldn’t.

That won’t work. The suggestions show in the main window after the video is done.

I can provide an FTP with unlimited bandwidth from my web host if you are interested. I don’t have any of the mirrors on it though (yet?)

Do you mean unlimited traffic? if it had unlimited bandwidth….. Well that’s just not possible.

It’s possible when you PAY for unlimited bandwidth :) And yes, it is bandwidth, not traffic.

Perhaps you were thinking transfer speeds. I mean monthly bandwidth is unlimited.

Ummm, bandwidth IS transfer speed. You may have unlimited traffic but austincurr is correct in saying that unlimited bandwidth is simply not possible.

Derek is right. I can make up an example.

Unlimited means that I can name any number, and that this number can be matched.

So when you say unlimited bandwidth, I say: “I want 1 Tera byte per second”. This is simply not possible with current technology.

On the other hand, in the old days, some people had to pay for the “average bandwidth” every month. If you do the math, that becomes an exact measure for total traffic. So to those people the term “unlimited bandwidth” means “unlimited average bandwidth” which is equivalent to “unlimited traffic”. (only limited by…. wait for it…. bandwidth… :-) )

Can we just step back from this for a second?

The hosting industry propagated this incorrect terminology. If you take a look around, most hosting providers have this listed just as the user here quoted it: “UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH! $xx per month”

Have a look at what happened here:

Someone, out of the kindness of their heart, volunteers a dedicated port on a commercial server, and people just can’t let the improper terminology go… even in the face of kindness.

Big brownie points to teh first person to step up and apologize for being so rude about this.

Email send! ;)

Ah, finally someplace where can step in and help out. Got some TB spare traffic per month I can donate. Gonna send Liam a msg….

P.S.:
Are donors more likely to get a first batch RPi?
Just kidding.. ;-)

Can’t you just host this file on a Cyberlocker? E.G. Fileserve/ Rapidshare etc (I’d add Megaupload but it got shut down…)

I’m not very fond of file-sharing websites – the amount of ads is way too high, the waiting times are annoying, and the speed is often limited, just to mention a few negative aspects – and I think the Raspberry Pi team is not fond of them either. Plus, you never know when they may delete your file or simply vanish, like what happened with the Mega* websites.

True, some don’t have any waiting times like Mediafire, but I agree they may be too much hassle for some people.

In that case, they could try hosting them on Sourceforge, as they host their files on a lot of mirrors.

This post was meant as a response to your post here….but somehow it got mixed up

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/683#comment-12120

Great, naked photos Jennifer Anniston i’m definitely going to Liam’s tutorial page, i did wonder how you were going to get kids to learn coding.

How about providing an AWS S3 bucket with locked down aws credentials?

Why not uploading it as an archive to e.g. rapidshare.com?…

We are proud to be helping with the distribution of the Raspberry Pi operating systems on our server at http://www.tinyuploadz.com (Free and easy file sharing). I also can’t wait to get my hands on one :D

At http://www.tinyuploadz.com we are hosting all of these files on our server with no intention of removing them. Raspberry Pi’s team now has access to an FTP account and we are also keeping uploads of them on our own as well such as the Debian version at http://www.tinyuploadz.com/download/file/ablf8H So the files are always going to be available on some form of HTTP downloads as we have these files on special lockdown for no removal :) We will also do our best to keep these files updated. The FTP account will most likely have the most up-to-date versions though.

I am waiting for the Rsync instructions (what data you need) then I will donate my 10TB 1gbps NL/DE bandwidth if still needed!

I will keep seeding until the mirror image on my box is ready. Will write you an E-Mail once it’s done. (10Mbit/s can I provide)

Are we there yet!?

Hi,

Liam please could you get in contact via the email address provided in this post, I am highly interested in setting up a mirror but I need to check a few things with you first, with regards to structure and requirements.

Best Regards

Rob @ Putt Hosting

As far as mirroring, I’m not in. I will be seeding the torrent files at 30Mbps for… A long long time.

Hello,
once there is an rsync server available, I’m offering to mirror RasPI images (or pretty much anything legal) on our Czech Republic based mirror (2GBps, nginx).
http://mirror.dkm.cz/

Tomas

Done as promised.
http://raspberrypi.mirror.dkm.cz/pub/RaspberryPi
ftp://raspberrypi.mirror.dkm.cz/pub/RaspberryPi
rsync://raspberrypi.mirror.dkm.cz/RaspberryPi

Have you considered hosting these as a Sourceforge Project.

As they mirror to a lot of universities and other mirrors, and the whole site is dedicated to Open Source software.

Personally I feel that some of Sourceforge’s download mirrors are slower for me than most HTTP mirrors of the Raspberry Pi downloads… Plus, I already hosted a project with Sourceforge before, and I can tell that from my experience the whole thing is not suited for uploading and downloading 800MB+ files.

“Liz has asked if data on how many downloads are made from the trusted mirrors can be given to the Foundation, so they can make estimates about how many Raspberry Pis they will need to produce, so you’ll be helping out in more than one way.” so i should download it 100 times?

I will help you :D

Is it possible to post a non-video tutorial for the Debian build? It’s just a matter of learning style; I work just fine with checklists, but videos overwhelm me a bit.

Thanks!

Hi RaspBand and Boys/Girls,
I put the files on my hosting in India. You can find it here : http://waoos.in/raspberrypi/
No FTP, don’t know the server speed, and… Enjoy ! That is why I use this channel to talk as it is not formal at all.
Sorry, this is the French Exception ! Always doing the wrong thing, right ? :)
Take care, keep on going and make this world better, always !

PS : the file will be safe till August, 25 ’12

Does that mean RaspberryPi people want to get rid of “unofficial” mirrors?

No.

I was just concerning about rights and license issues.
thx for the answer!
I’ll configure my server as what Liam says and to become official one, once I have a time!

Hi Liz,

as always any news is good news. I love the way you guys make every aspect of the development process as transparent as possible. Are there any pics from the factory and the packaging?

Thx

No, I’m afraid; we’re doing all the factory stuff remotely, so we don’t have an actual human being there to take pics!

next Polish mirror online, mail out
1Gbit/s, unlimited traffic
url: http://nigdzie.org/raspberrypi/
This mirror is hosted by Nigdzie.org all for Fun !

[…] hier gehts zur Originalmeldung […]

i am so happy for the torrent link as i prefer torrents to direct downloads and will seed to 10:1 or more if it hits that fast

would it be okay, to host the image on rapidshare (no ads, no waitingtimes)?

because right now, im uploading it to my rs-account and would share the link here, when allowed. otherwise, i would delete it from rs…

Polish guys, you are Polish but your hostings are out of the Poland, whats with geolocation?

http://raspberrypi.seedbox24.pl/ – OVH/France
http://mirror-raspberrypi.tk/ – Hetzner/Germany

Only ‘sos’ and ‘tomekk’ are OK.

Best Regards

here is Polish one ;)
next Polish mirror online, mail out
1Gbit/s, unlimited traffic
url: http://nigdzie.org/raspberrypi/

http://raspberrypi.seedbox24.pl/
now it is on cloud in e24cloud.com ;)

just a note to those who can use torrents – it is fast – from 0 to 1.5mB/s in 20 seconds and then steady at my connections full speed (1.5mB/s) for the 8 minutes it took to complete.

I keep seeding the torrent @100 Mbit i think the torrent download should be the fastest option for pretty much anyone who can use torrent.
I hope to get my hands on one of those 10.000 Units to, because the download counts of the image just fear me of, that it will be sold out after minutes…

since noone is against it, here is the rs-link

[[Liz – link removed – see below]]

if not allowed, please delete.

I hope you don’t mind (and it’s good of you to make the effort to put it out there – and also very good of you to check with us), but I’m removing the link. This is simply because keeping things centralised, in the way that Liam is sorting out for us, is much better for the Foundation; it means we can push out patches and make sure that everything is always the most up-to-date version if we can maintain some degree of control. It also means we can keep tabs on the number of downloads, which will help us to make rough predictions about how many units we need to be making.

well, i dont mind.
thank you for the reply.

btw: wouldnt it be cool if you can make a “counter” on the website for the downloads? i (and i think many others, too) just wanna know, how often the image was loaded…

100th comment

And so full of content and value. Thanks.

Hi Liz and the rest of the world,

I’m wondering if the mail with my mirror was recived properly? I didn’t get an answer, and my logs show no activity :/

Will they answer me when my mirror got set up? Is there no more need for a mirror, so they dropped my mail?
I’m just wondering, because I’d like to help the RasPi-Foundation. It’s really a great project! :)

Thanks if you answer :)

FlySoftiii

Liam’s dealing with this, so I’m not sure – but I believe he is answering everyone; it’s just that he’s had more than 100 people volunteer their mirrors, so it may take him a little time to get to everybody!

Okay, i just wanted to know… Thanks for your answer :)

i have same issue ;) mail is out days ago and nothing :D
but on traffic i can see debian6-17-02-2012.zip 8822117KB out

Same with me…
I just want to help. :P
Perhaps it got into the spam filter :D

Im seeding the torrent on my Seedbox, which has quite a beefy/speedy connection, so should help out. Feels good to be able to assist in some way :)

ftp://u442871039:raspberry@raspberry.golovics.com/public_html/debian6-17-02-2012.zip Unlimited mirror!!!!!

Hey! I’ve tested uploading one file to this http://FTP... and it’s write enabled!!!

Take in mind that ANYONE can upload/download anything, and you have writed all server details in a public comment.

Anyone could substitute the image for other archive.

Please, change user credentials and send it privately by mail.

I’d love to help with mirroring. I’ve just added my link to the Wiki, but I can’t become an official mirror since I only have 500gb of bandwidth right now. I’ll certainly make sure to donate some more if I upgrade later.

Hello, this is my small contribution.

http://r-pi.tmuniz.com (100 mbps), Dallas, Texas, USA.

Is there a list of official mirrors somewhere? I’m a little curious to see how many they are, and how many url:s I might recognize :)

you can go here:
http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/download.php?file=/images/debian/6/debian6-17-02-2012/debian6-17-02-2012.zip&continent=EU
its loadbalance so mirror will be auto choose.

Hi, no facility to Mirror but have set up torrent to come on automatically on my machine waiting for the big day.
I am wondering if people will first be taken to a torrent link and then if they want they can go from there to a mirror therefore encouraging them to torrent?

May I suggest that the RasPi foundation also provide a digital signature alongside the image/sha1 files on mirrors, so that we can check whether the distribution is an original RasPi or a derivative?

Thanks.

I had Leaseweb set Liam up with some mirrors, ended up with 3 servers with 4Gbit each!

Hi we have sent in our particulars, Clan NetGodz would be more than happy to provide storage and bandwidth for this project, in the past we have provided multi-gig transfers and storage for various projects we like.

Humbly,
ramos96

We also put a mirror online!

URL: http://raspberrypi.mirror.triple-it.nl
Location: The Netherlands
Uplink: 1Gbit/s

I am seeding the torrent 24/7 and tried a download as well. Really fast (3.6MByte/s) as there are many seeders.
Raspberry Pi will stay on my seeding list. You should bluntly ask users to use the torrent and only provide the direct download links as fallback (move it further down, make it smaller and give the torrent download a nice, colorful button). Tell them why and it will at least move some traffic away from the valuable server bandwidths.

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