Thinking of offering a slice of your bandwidth to help spread the podcast? This page is just for you! It describes the steps needed to set up and register a mirror of the Ubuntu-UK podcast.

We assume that you have a server, Apache, and SSH set up and running - also a fast connection speed such as 100Mbps is preferable. Rsync must also be installed.

We're going to create a user and group called 'uupc' and store the mp3 and Ogg files in /srv/uupc-mirror/.

Account set up

This section sets up a uupc account for the sync user script. This script is run on release and triggers the mirror synchronization to the master rsync repository.

Tip: Should you wish to automate this process, the setup-uupc-mirror.sh script is available.

First, we require root privileges to create the account:

sudo -i

Now create a group for the podcast user:

groupadd uupc

Create the user with the appropriate flags:

useradd -c uupc -d /home/uupc/ -s /bin/sh -m -g uupc uupc

Create a .ssh directory for the user, this is where the SSH key for syncing shall be stored:

mkdir -p /home/uupc/.ssh

Download and place the SSH key in the created directory:

wget http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/~daviey/authorized_keys \
    -O /home/uupc/.ssh/authorized_keys

Note that the key's fingerprint is: be:3a:81:ec:ac:a9:e6:17:19:e8:3c:48:53:87:a3:4e. Please make sure you downloaded the correct key. ssh-keygen -lf /home/uupc/.ssh/authorized_keys will print the fingerprint.

Change the permissions so that the uupc user owns the new files in their home directory:

chown -R uupc:uupc /home/uupc/.ssh
chmod 700 /home/uupc/.ssh
chmod 600 /home/uupc/.ssh/authorized_keys

Now edit the "/home/uupc/.ssh/authorized_keys" with your favourite editor to point to the mirror's location on the server, this is the directory where we're storing the media files (/srv/uupc-mirror in our example here). This location is specified after the host - it's /var/www/ by default in the file you just downloaded (between 'podcast.ubuntu-uk.org::podcast' and '--exclude').

vim ~uupc/.ssh/authorized_keys

And exit the root session:

exit

DNS configuration

Next, we have to contact podcast (at) ubuntu-uk (dot) org with details about the server, connection speed, location, IP, OS (You have installed Ubuntu on it, have you not?), and they will assign you a domain name based on your location. If the mirror is located in France, this could be fr-pa-0.static.podcast.ubuntu-uk.org for example.

Apache configuration

Now with DNS done and forgotten, we must set up Apache or another HTTP daemon that we are running, this section deals with Apache.

Create a configuration file named /etc/apache2/sites-available/uupc-mirror and enter the following configuration:

NameVirtualHost fr-pa-0.static.podcast.ubuntu-uk.org
<VirtualHost fr-pa-0.static.podcast.ubuntu-uk.org>
        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
        ServerName fr-pa-0.static.podcast.ubuntu-uk.org
        
        DocumentRoot /srv/uupc-mirror
        <Directory />
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride None
        </Directory>
        <Directory /srv/uupc-mirror>
                Options +Indexes -Includes
                IndexOptions NameWidth=* SuppressDescription
                IndexIgnore index.xhtml
                DirectoryIndex None
                AllowOverride None
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>

        CustomLog /var/log/apache2/uupc-mirror-access.log combined
        ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/uupc-mirror-error.log

        # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
        # alert, emerg.
        LogLevel warn

        ServerSignature On
</VirtualHost>

Don't forget to change the VirtualHost, NameVirtualHost and ServerName fields to the domain name you were assigned to, and also the Directory where you podcast mirror is.

Now; enable the site:

sudo a2ensite uupc-mirror

And, lo-and-behold; reload/graceful our Apache:

sudo invoke-rc.d apache2 reload

Point your browser to the new domain and you should see the Apache directory listing with a "uupc" directory there!

The End of the Guide

That's it! In a matter of time you shall start to receive hits as the automatic download mirror selector does its magic.