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.
