[RULE] Again on the website (out of town tomorrow)

[Vegard Munthe]

> If there are a significant number of potential or interested mirrors out
> there, we could also implement an rsync-based solution too. Already does
> all we need, and people could synchronize with the actual website or
> download just the tarball.

The problem with mirroring a site that updates itself from a database, is
that we want a static mirror, i.e. we don't want to mirror the DB or poll
the DB. But we do want to send people who submit forms on the mirror to
the main site, or report an error if it is not available. This can easily
be done with a bit of planning, but rsync'ing it might not be the best
solution.

Mirrors serve as replacements if the main site is down, and as download
areas that are closer in the bitstream. The latter is the most important,
since the former hardly ever happens.

My suggestion is to make mirroring as simple as possible. Use wget to
mirror daily, both site and downloadarea. But to do this we need the
following:

1) Relative links (as mentioned) except on links to forms.
2) HTTP headerinformation on updates.

I have currently fixed the first problem with gsed, i.e. I travese the
site and change all absolute links to rule-project.org, and Marco set the
last updated to the current time with PHP to fix the second problem.

With this setup you can mirror the site with wget -m. If 1) and 2) were
set, anyone could do this easily.

Rsync could be used for mirroring if a static dump was made of the site to
an rsync repository first.

Regarding ISO mirroring, rsync would be great, but i think wget -m would
suffice here as well. As long as wget does not update files it already has
(i.e. it sees they are the same by comparing timestamps etc.) it will all
work smoothly.

I have set up continous web-site mirroring on rule.mint.no, but I do not
do continuous ISO mirroring yet. (Havn't had time to test continous wget
-m).

-- Vego



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