From this morning (October 01) on, ftp.uni-erlangen.de and ftp.fau.de point to new hardware.

The new machine is much more powerful than the old one, and we tried our best to make the mirroring setup as robust as possible. Hopefully, incosistent and outdated mirrors (because the mirror-job hung) are now a thing of the past. You can actually check this yourself: The FTP startpage lists the last successful run for all major mirrors, and there is also a page that shows how long the last mirror runs took and if they succeeded or not.

Another new feature on the startpage is that we show how much traffic the server has distributed the day before. We’re planning to further improve these stats, so that we can show the traffic per individual mirror. However, this is not finished yet.

The hardware specs of the new server are:

• HP DL360 G8 with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPUs E5-2640 (2.50GHz, 2 sockets with 12 cores + 12 SMT threads)
• 64 GB RAM
• Two HP D2600 with 12x 2 TB NL-SAS hard discs each, on a SmartArray P822 RAID controller in RAID6
• 2x 10 GBit network interfaces (bonded / LACP)

There are some changes to the access methods:

• The FTP previously supported FTP with SSL. This no longer is the case.
• We now support HTTPS
• We now support RSYNC, though this is still experimental. We will disable RSYNC again if it proves to cause too much load on the server.
• We support IPv6 again. For technical reasons, the old FTP had no longer supported IPv6 connections for the last year.

In general, most of the mirrors that existed on the old FTP should be available. Though they now no longer reside in sub-sub-directorys like e.g. /pub/mirrors/ubuntu or /mirrors/ubuntu but simply in /ubuntu instead, symlinks have been set up from the old locations so that old links should still work. We did however clean out some mirrors that no longer made sense, for example:

• Cherokee (webserver) – cherokee no longer uses a mirror network, they now host their downloads on github (though they still link to outdated mirrors from their download page – really great work guys!)
• opensolaris – this project was killed off in 2009
• aminet – we haven’t been an official mirror since 2006

Should we accidently have dropped a mirror that you think still makes sense, or forgotten a symlink, feel free to contact us.

Some new mirrors were added:

• centos
• epel
• FEMnet recordings from CCC conferences

Last but not least, the official name of the server is now “ftp.fau.de” instead of “ftp.uni-erlangen.de” – to fit with the “corporate identity” of FAU.

So go ahead and try the new FTP:

• http://ftp.fau.de – access through HTTP
• https://ftp.fau.de – access through HTTPS
• ftp://ftp.fau.de – access through FTP
• rsync://ftp.fau.de – access through RSYNC