MPCORB Database Mirror Sites
In order to ensure good availability of the
MPCORB data set, it is
desirable to have a number of
mirror sites scattered around the world.
We have had one official mirror site operating in the Czech Republic for
a number of years--we would like to add more.
This version of the document is dated 2007 April 9. Additions to the
locations and/or requirements may be made based on feedback.
The list of geographical locations where it might be desirable to have
additional mirror sites is as follows:
- One site in the eastern United States;
- Two sites in the western United States;
- One or two sites in the central United States;
- One or two sites in Central and South America;
- One or two more sites in Europe;
- One or two more sites in Asia;
- One or two sites in Africa;
- One or two sites in Oceania.
When sites are selected, there is some initial setup that you will be
required to do. Once our scripts have been modified to include your
site in the updating process, there will be a test period while we check
that the updates are being performed correctly on a nightly basis. When
those tests are complete, we will add a link to the new site.
There are a number of requirements for hosting a mirror site. These
requirements are as follows:
- A computer with read-only anon-ftp capability (the operating system
on your system
is not important, subject to it being capable of fulfilling the
requirements).
- You must either own the machine, or be in a legal position to allow use
to be made of it.
- A permanent connection to the Internet.
- Sufficient bandwidth to cope with frequent downloading of 60MB+ files.
- At least 2 GB of available disk space. The current MPCORB files amount to
200 MB, but this amount is growing rapidly. In addition, when the files
are being updated, the disk space requirement grows to twice that amount.
Requiring 2 GB of available disk space allows significant room
for expansion.
- Case-sensitive filesystem. This is required to ensure uniformity in
the names of the MPCORB files on different ftp servers. It is sufficient
for the case-sensitivity to apply only to the display of the filenames,
rather than to access of files (i.e., a file is displayed as Sensitive.txt
but is accessible as Sensitive.txt or SENSITIVE.TXT or any case
combination).
- SSH2 installed, to allow files to be transferred by sftp. We use host-key
authentication.
- We require a special account (preferably called "mpc") to be setup on
the machine, that we will use in the updating process. If your OS allows it, this account should
be granted only enough privileges to log in, put files on the disk
and rename and delete files in the MPCORB directory and sub-directories
therein: it should have no access to any other file or directory on the
system.
- Once the special account is setup, we will log in to set up the
required directory structure and do a test transfer to check that the
host-key authentication is setup correctly. Once this is confirmed,
we will do a manual run of the script that copies MPCORB. When it is
is verified that the transfer completed and that the files are accessible
to ftp users, we will activate the nightly copying of MPCORB. Once the
nightly run is operating successfully, we will put a link to the new
mirror.
If you are interested in hosting a mirror site and can satisfy all
the above requirements, please use the
feedback
form to initiate discussions. Serious enquiries only, please.
Index to the CBAT/MPC/ICQ pages.
MPC
