How to become a LAM/MPI mirror site

The LAM Team greatly appreciates any new mirror site. There are three main steps to becoming an official LAM/MPI mirror site:

• Please read the following guidelines:
1. Please join the LAM mirrors mailing list. This is a very low-volume mailing list that we use for sending out announcements, problems with mirror sites, etc. Questions, comments, and suggestions about the mirroring process can also be sent to this list.
2. Please update your mirror site at least once a week. We recognize that not all sites have the bandwidth luxury to update every day (note that the rsync method is quite efficient and transfers very little data if the LAM web site has not changed since your last update). However, we would like to have mirror sites that are at least "mostly current" with the main web site.
• Send the following information to the LAM mirrors list:
  1. Text for the tagline for your mirror site. This text appears on both the main mirror list and on the lower left corner of every page on your mirror site. This text is typically the physical location of your mirror site.
  2. The official URL for your mirror site. This will be added to the main LAM/MPI mirror list.
  3. The IP address where you will be mirroring from (this may be different than the IP address of the URL of your mirror site). Among other things, we use this IP address to serve up the correct tagline when you mirror the site.
• Setup an automated process to update your mirror. There are currently two ways to mirror the LAM web site:
  1. Use rsync to download the LAM/MPI web site on a regular basis. You need to have PHP4 installed on your web server for this to be possible. The URL to use for syncronization is: www.lam-mpi.org::lam_web. We also suggest the following options for rsync:

     shell$ rsync -r -p -t -D -L -H --copy-unsafe-links --delete --delete-excluded \
       --delete-after --force www.lam-mpi.org::lam_web /your/local/docroot
     

     This script is suitable for mirror sites to install in a cron job and run on a regular basis. You will need to modify the top of it to identify the local directory where to download the mirror site.

  2. We used to allow standard mirroring agents (such as wget), but have since deprecated the uses of these since rsync is much more efficient.

  Once you have successfully mirror the LAM/MPI site a few times, let us know, and your mirror site entry will be acivated in the main LAM/MPI mirror list.

Thanks!