Some history: There was an unfortunate incident that happened when someone offered to mirror Mamboportal. There was a misunderstanding such that the offer was rejected. The person that made the offer flipped out and said some harmful stuff.
Now that is all history - I don't want to drag up what happened when that person flipped out as it is a closed matter. I only mentioned it so that people know that I am aware of that incident when they read what I want to say below.
Mirroring means:
1) an
exact copy of the site is made
without modifications which is automatically synchronised to the master site
2) the only purpose of mirroring is the ease the load on the main site. anyone that mirrors a site is donating bandwidth
3) a community site that is mirrored it can never be taken off air by the failure of a single server
4) control of a mirrored site stays with the site owner. they update the master and the mirrors only reflect that master. control, copyright and intellectual property remains with the site owner
You can only download content from the apache.org site through a mirror
http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi . That is an example of the community helping apache with its bandwidth. Also when you download linux most people choose a mirror close to them for their distro. Once again this is a powerful example of community mirroring being a donation of bandwidth.
The reason that I wanted to say this is that when Mamboportal was off air recently one of the things that was sited was bandwidth and space cost. The community could help Arthur by trusted and professional System Administration mambers mirroring his site to ease this matter.
So what I am appealing for the community to approach Arthur through mambers to both explain to him how mirroring is a donation to him - and for professional sysadmins to setup a mirroring network for him such that he drives the content across a cluster of mirror sites. Things could be setup so that downloads are *only* taken from mirrors. Then he will never have to pay for download bandwidth ever again - without every loosing any control of the content of his site.
A key word above is "trust". I am a junior system administrator what has only had one conversation with Arthur. I would not expect him to take my words without question. I am a sysadm at a bank - so I cannot offer him space on our servers. So I have said all of this here as there are mambers that Arthur can trust whole heatedly - and I am sure that there are sysadmins where that can offer professional space. So I post this here to bring the trust and the resources together to help Mamboportal.
