Mirrors

Revision 442 as of 2010-06-07 21:56:16

Clear message

Looking for a list of Ubuntu archive or CD images mirrors?

The distribution of Ubuntu CD images and packages can always be improved. There's a team working on improving user experiences every day, making Ubuntu available to you. You can help too, by creating a mirror of your own and provide people near you with a reliable mirror.

These pages tell you what to expect, and what Ubuntu expects. You can also find example scripts to sync, and guidelines on maintaining your mirror.

There are two types of mirrors:

  • Country mirrors (e.g. nl.archive.ubuntu.com/nl.releases.ubuntu.com)
  • Normal mirrors (reachable via their own hostname)

If you wish to create a new mirror please see this page and the links provided there. If you want to apply for being a country mirror, please read these requirements.

Registration

If your mirror is meant to be used by others, please go and register it at Launchpad. You may need to create a Launchpad account first. When your registration is successful and approved, it will show up on the mirror lists on Launchpad. It will also be checked by Launchpad. If you registered a CD-mirror and registration is successful and approved, it will also show up on the Ubuntu download pages.

Mirror Guidelines

To keep your mirror up to date and working, please follow these guidelines:

  • Be committed to being a mirror. Obviously, each offer to be an Ubuntu mirror is great and users appreciate it. However, it's in nobody's interest to go and change the sources.list every time a mirror disappears. So if you're not planning on creating a mirror for the long run, don't register it. People might get disappointed in you and/or Ubuntu.

  • Know what you're starting with. A mirror may cause a lot of traffic. If your server has insufficient bandwidth, users cannot download very well and your machine may become unreachable. If you pay for traffic, please note that traffic might increase, a lot.

  • Make sure you have enough disk space. The Ubuntu archive, as of 2010-02-19, uses about:

    • 320GB of disk space for the Ubuntu package archive.

    • 39GB for Ubuntu release CD images.

  • ... and is slowly growing. A full disk will get you out of sync and cause problems for your users.

  • Keep up to date. Please try to mirror about four times a day (so every six hours) for archive mirrors. Since Ubuntu only releases every six months or so, a daily check on a releases mirror is sufficient. Push mirroring is available as an alternative.

  • Monitor the output of your sync scripts. Sometimes, syncing of the mirrors fails. That's ok, but it is very important that you monitor that and correct faults. Missing packages are not very user-friendly, so try to avoid that.

  • Subscribe to the mirror mailing lists. There are two mailing lists for mirror admins, you have the ubuntu-mirrors mailing list for discussion and tips & tricks about mirroring. There's also ubuntu-mirrors-announce which announces big updates and deletes on the mirrors.

Country mirror requirements

If you want to apply for being a country mirror, you MUST follow these requirements:

Releases Statistics

Releases approximately take up the following number of bytes (as of 23/04/2010):

Release

Size in bytes

Dapper

74011633533

Hardy

71459300249

Jaunty

66119797274

Karmic

72325131376

Lucid

66554451321

Communication

If you want to get in touch with other mirror-admins, feel free to join us at #ubuntu-mirrors on Freenode. Also, if you have questions, email us at mirrors@ubuntu.com.


CategoryArchive