[Bf-webcontent] Re: Fwd: Blender.org website section email

[Glen Moyes]

Oh yeah, this mirroring script is going to be nice. This is going to 
make my job that much easier.

Not having BitTorrent shouldn't be a problem. I'm always getting emails 
from people that want to host the files, however I have to turn most of 
them down because they only have a few GB bandwidth a month (previous 
experience shows that the least popular mirror needs at least 20GB 
bandwidth a day just to host the files). So basically any mirror with 
anything less than unlimited bandwidth has went down fast and hard. In 
the future we are going to have far more video tutorials than we have 
now. My concern is that even our best mirrors won't be able to handle 
it. Making these available at the e-shop would help with the downloads.

Also, I have one mirror that wants to put a link to their hosting 
company next to his. Because his hosting company understood that it was 
for an open source project they cut him a break that really helped him 
become on of our better mirrors. Putting a link there would make his 
hosting even happier (considering how much of their bandwidth he's 
using). Anyway, with this script is it possible to put a separate link 
to the hosting company next to the mirror link? Or should the mirror 
link just be "My Mirror (hosted by www.hosting-blah.com) (USA)"?

Also, does the URL to the mirror have to contain "release/filename" or 
"videos/filename" or whatever directory name we decide use? Because 
every mirror I have does it differently.

- Glen

Bart Veldhuizen wrote:

> The mirror system will be http (maybe ftp) based only, but it will be 
> smart enough to figure out on which server a certain file is 
> available. You can already see it in action here:
>
> http://blender3d.org/mirror/release/Blender2.36/blender-2.36-windows.exe
>
> Everything after /mirror/ is part of the filename to be mirrored. This 
> means that once we start using the mirror script, we only need to put 
> one download link in for each file.
>
> The availability of files is cached, so it doesn't have to check the 
> mirrors for each request. Checking is still quite slow, mainly because 
> of the painfully slow ftp connection to umn.edu.
>
> The fact that the script checks for itself which servers host a 
> certain file means that mirrors can decide for themselves which files 
> they will host or how much traffic/month they will allow. If they 
> don't have a file, or they temporarily close their connection, the 
> link will simply disappear.
>
> We have decided to drop support for bittorrent files, at least for our 
> own files, because so many people have difficulty with them. For this 
> reason, I think we should move away from it all together IF we get 
> enough mirror sites that are willing to host large media files.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bart
>
>