[Glug-nith-discuss] Fwd: [Ilug-cal-discuss ] Looking for FOSS contribs from India… where are the local mirrors?

[Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray]

For your information.

Cheers,
Debarshi

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Indranil Das Gupta <address@hidden>
Date: 1 Dec 2007 10:24
Subject: [Ilug-cal-discuss] Looking for FOSS contribs from India…
where are the local mirrors?
To: ilug-cal-discuss <address@hidden>
Cc: address@hidden, sanjit <address@hidden>,
arin basu <address@hidden>, address@hidden,
address@hidden, Tamal Sen <address@hidden>,
address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
address@hidden, sankar sen <address@hidden>,
address@hidden, address@hidden, Valsa Williams
<address@hidden>, address@hidden, address@hidden,
address@hidden


Debarshi "Rishi" Ray (wears different hats - a young pro working at
Salt Lake Sector V, an ILUG-Cal member, a successful Google Summer of
Code '07 participant and a graduate of NIT Hamirpur) came over today
to collect the Fedora 8 x86_64 DVD iso. I set the disk to burn and
went out for a quick lunch. It was all done by the time we're back,
thanks to the fact that it was readily available from the local
mirror[1] on the WBUT intranet.

Officially today is the end of the 3rd month of operation of the FOSS
mirror at WBUT (for the pedantically inclined its more like 2 months
and 20 days). The mirror has come a long way since Susmit & I started
tweaking it in the early days of September. It started off quietly
with a Fedora 7 mirror for (i386 and x86_64) and CRAN - The
Comprehensive R Archive Network. The choice was driven primarily by
"selfish" interests. It was to serve as resource base for the series
of Amazing R Workshops [2] by Dr. Arindam Basu, jointly organised by
us (L2C2 Technologies) and WBUT, and the first series of large-scale
Linux InstallFests[3][4] in this part of the country (a joint effort
of WBUT-LUG and ILUG-Cal.ORG).

The mirror, which rsync updates itself at least once daily, now hosts :

a) CRAN
b) Fedora 7 / 8 mirrors
c) Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn)
d) Debian (Etch)
e) Mozilla
f) OpenOffice.Org,
g) the Linux Documentation Project

So much for the background, here are some interesting facts that the
server stats throw up. Do keep in mind that the mirror is physically
located on an aging IBM x206 box [5], sharing a 3 MBPS pipe with
around 250 desktops with about 80 - 120 simultaneous users at any
given time during the peak working hours.

Stats snippets for November

Unique visitors         Number of visits        Pages   Hits    Bandwidth
691                     1526                    22488   49090   373.68 GB

Countries (Top 10)
=================
Countries       Pages   Hits    Bandwidth
Unknown         10974   11335   26.19 GB
India           9145    34710   341.22 GB
Austria         545     547     15.21 KB
United States   398     486     3.57 GB
China           201     283     323.97 MB
Iran            183     280     243.99 MB
Italy           182     233     552.14 MB
Pakistan        100     139     161.97 MB
Japan           67      94      74.42 MB
Bangladesh      62      89      161.87 MB
Others          631     894     1.22 GB

File type (listing on the type with highest download percent)
iso             118     0.2 %   352.46 GB       94.3 %

The last stat, imho, tells the most interesting story. That 94.3% or
352.46 GB out of 373.68 GB comprised of ISOs.

During the last 12 months or so, I have had the opportunity to travel,
meet and work closely with a lot of young engineering students in West
Bengal. Of those I interacted with, many were interested in exploring
/ learning more about FOSS. This interest I consider to be the first
step towards creating the users, some of whom are also potential
contributors, given the proper hints and nudges to the right
direction.

The primary question I faced was how / where do I get hold of updated
distributions / software. Setting up of the mirror was our bit in
trying to meet that challenge, that the bits that are required for
contribution are available to the potential developers irrespective of
the connection / bandwidth quality.

For sure, it will be *really* nice to have "Official" country (IN)
mirrors of the distros and other major FOSS software in India. For
example, taking up Fedora Project as a case in point, I seriously
doubt how soon we are going to have one in India (Fedora requires a
minimum of 100Mbit connectivity for being a official fedora public
mirror).

In fact, instead of "Official Country Mirrors", IMHO, we need several
"local" (read regional / state-wise) mirrors in India. Our Indian
community requires up-to-date access to new software, including access
to _unstable_ developmental trees and branches. For example, I met
quite a few enthusiastic FOSS users in the small town of Siliguri in
North Bengal, all using Fedora Core 3 or 4 - the latest available with
them.

The bottom line, ensuring distribution of Free / Open source software,
include the developmental branches is the key to the Indian Contrib to
FOSS. Developer attention is primarily focussed on the devel branches.
So, let 100 mirrors bloom! 'Nuf said!


References:

[1] http://mirror.wbut.ac.in
[2] http://events.wbut.ac.in/index.php/RFA/
[3] http://indradg.randomink.org/blog/archives/71
[4] http://indradg.randomink.org/blog/archives/73
[5] 
http://www-605.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?storeId=344&catalogId=-344&langId=344&dualCurrId=104&categoryId=13395888


--
Indranil Das Gupta
Chief Technology Architect
L2C2 Technologies

E-Mail  : address@hidden
Phone   : +91-98300-20971
WWW     : http://www.l2c2.co.in
IRC     : indradg on irc.freenode.net
Blog    : http://indradg.randomink.org/blog/


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