Re: Resource discovery, replication (WWW Announcements archives?)

Brian Behlendorf <brian@wired.com>
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Date: Wed, 4 May 1994 06:32:22 +0200
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From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@wired.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Resource discovery, replication (WWW Announcements archives?)
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On Wed, 4 May 1994, Markus Stumpf wrote:
> Daniel W. Connolly writes:
> |>This could also be used as a way of distributing information about
> |>replicated data. A mirror archive site could post a summary of its
> |>contents, with (a) references to its own contents(A), and (b)
> |>references to the original materials that it mirrors(B), and (c) a
> |>machine-readable indication that A is a copy of B. Then any client
> |>looking for any part of B that also has access to c can try looking at
> |>A if it's closer or more available.
> 
> I think we should really go away from "mirror" as known by now.
> The solution used by caching HTTPds right now is IMHO the more
> efficent and more transparent. And you always have the information
> where you got it from and a kind of expiry mechanism.
> I really hate all those sites "mirroring" e.g. Xmosaic documentation
> or the like. It is NEVER accurate and uptodate und you NEVER know
> whether this is a selfmade or a mirrored.

Well, we (WIRED) would much rather have our information mirrored at a
specific site rather than cached around the world.  Data about frequency
of use and popularity of particular pages is important to us, as is
insuring that pages cached around the world are as up to date as possible. 
With official mirror sites we could insure that the data gets updated on a
regular basis (three times a week is good for us) and that access logs can
be forwarded to us for analysis.  

We have a semi-official mirror policy - I'll append it at the end of this
message.  It's purposefully fairly heavy-handed, as the documents people
are asking to mirror are quite valuable, and since our copyright is on
the *collection* of the articles anyways.  A couple places have asked 
about being mirrors, but after seeing our policy they didn't inquire 
further :)  We are interested though in possibly having a mirror in
Europe and the Orient - if you're interested let me know.  

	Brian


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We have a pretty strict mirror site policy, since our copyright is
on the collection of articles.  But, we are interested in possibly
having a mirror, one in europe and one in the far east, but there
are certain conditions we need met to protect our interests and
copyright.  If you can meet the following, then you could be a
mirror.  Here they are:

1)  We need logs, sent to us weekly, of all the accesses to the
Wired part of your site.  We are very interested in traffic.

2)  You must have the complete mirror exactly as it appears on
our site, and it must be mirrored three times a week.  There are
mirroring tools being developed now that will make this an
easy thing to do, and will only transfer those files which have
changed.

3)  We need to have a login on your machine with write access
to the directory holding the copied files.

4)  Any additional services you think would be cool to add 
should be sent to us first, and we'll set them up on our
side (which will get mirrored to yours).

5)  Interactive forms and scripts should of course still point to
our machine, but you can run a local WAIS server if you want.

6)  You still have a pointer to our home page here at www.wired.com,
since we will be offering many extra things in the near future.

7)  We reserve the right to take any part of or all of the 
back issues out of publication on the net.