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FOSS Mirroring on a budget: how a question turned into 253gbps of worldwide bandwidth in under a yea

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FOSS Mirroring on a budget: how a question turned into 253gbps of worldwide bandwidth in under a yea
FOSSY 2023

Everyone makes use of the existing open source mirroring systems that are present to download their favorite bit of FOSS, be that Video Lan Client, Libreoffice, or your favorite Linux distribution. There are a lot of entities that donate these resources into the community from Universities, to ISPs. The reasons why entities put forth this effort varies a lot, but ultimately they all share the want to help make it easy, and accessible, to acquire FOSS. In early 2022 Kenneth Finnegan approached John 'Warthog9' Hawley with an idea "hey we should build up a new public mirror for the internet exchange since the one that was there seems to have left". Once completed, Kenneth asked another question which set in motion much bigger things "what if we made mirrors out of $20 surplus thin clients?" which has turned into a cluster of 29 machines in a number of countries on 4 continents. This is a story of how FOSS mirroring works, the idea that was had behind the Micro Mirror (MM) project and how this helps the FOSS community from end to end, and what projects and users can do to help the entirety of the mirroring infrastructure out there.

Speakers: John 'Warthog9' Hawley