Shortening FOSS transaction time

The Open Source Lab recently split out its rsync services from general user services such as ftp and http that were hosted on ftp.osuosl.org. Now rsync.osuosl.org is completely seperate hardware that is updated by the projects that are hosted there. The server is a Dell 2650 with 1TB of attached RAID5 storage and we have given access to several projects (Gentoo, KDE and LFS) so that they can update their archives themselves and push out to the secondary mirrors (and subsequently end-users) even faster.

A case in point is Gentoo Linux that recently uploaded their latest release (2004.2) up to rsync.osuosl.org. See the bandwidth graph below:

You can see that in just 18 hours we were able to populate 23 seperate mirrors across the globe with 7.5GB of data. Normally this process can take days and days as the mirrors used to have to compete with end-users to get their data. Also, many projects are starting to realize that pre-populating downstream mirrors with some rsync trickery will allow you to ‘flip-the-bits’ when the actual release day comes.

Our goal in providing rsync.osuosl.org is to help projects such as Gentoo Linux propagate out their wares quickly and easily to their end-users thus helping shorten the open source transaction time.