FreeBSD-Archive site

[Ken Smith]

We have assembled as much as we can find as far as old releases go.
At the moment it is almost 130Gb for everything we've found so far.
On my site I set it up to be /pub/FreeBSD-Archive but it could be
made part of /pub/FreeBSD if you wanted to, everything is down
inside a directory named "old-releases".  For any of the releases
we could find the package set for it is down inside of the release
directory itself instead of being a separate directory tree.

This is what we have so far [ note it includes "current" releases
too, since they shouldn't be changing at this point ... ]:

old-releases/alpha:
3.4-RELEASE/    4.4-RELEASE/    4.6.2-RELEASE/  5.0-RELEASE/
4.2-RELEASE/    4.5-RELEASE/    4.7-RELEASE/    5.1-RELEASE/
4.3-RELEASE/    4.6-RELEASE/    4.8-RELEASE/    ISO-IMAGES/
old-releases/amd64:
5.1-RELEASE/    ISO-IMAGES/
old-releases/i386:
2.0.5-RELEASE/          3.1-RELEASE/            4.3-RELEASE/
2.1.5-RELEASE/          3.2-RELEASE/            4.4-RELEASE/
2.1.7-RELEASE/          3.3-RELEASE/            4.5-RELEASE/
2.1.7.1-RELEASE/        3.4-RELEASE/            4.6-RELEASE/
2.2.2-RELEASE/          3.5-RELEASE/            4.6.2-RELEASE/
2.2.5-RELEASE/          3.5.1-RELEASE/          4.7-RELEASE/
2.2.6-RELEASE/          4.0-RELEASE/            4.8-RELEASE/
2.2.7-RELEASE/          4.1-RELEASE/            5.0-RELEASE/
2.2.8-RELEASE/          4.1.1-RELEASE/          5.1-RELEASE/
3.0-RELEASE/            4.2-RELEASE/            ISO-IMAGES/
old-releases/ia64:
5.0-RELEASE/    5.1-RELEASE/    ISO-IMAGES/
old-releases/pc98:
5.0-RELEASE/    5.1-RELEASE/    ISO-IMAGES/     README.TXT
old-releases/sparc64:
5.0-RELEASE/    5.1-RELEASE/    ISO-IMAGES/

Anyone else interested in picking these up?  It would be one of
those "download once" type things - no need to sync on a routine
basis.  If we find new stuff for what is there now we can just
send a note to hubs@ letting people know.  Once you have it you
could maintain it yourself by just copying the current releases
into it shortly before they get removed from ftp-master.

If holding older releases in this fashion is done on "enough"
sites it might have an effect on the main site.  We haven't
circulated this idea much because whether it is possible will
depend on how many sites start to carry these older releases.
But maybe if "enough" sites pick up the archive site it won't
be as important for the main site to keep as many full releases
on it.  Users need a reasonable amount of time to upgrade from
these older releases - some sites may still be using 4.7 at
this point because it's not all that old and therefore may
still want to get at the packages-4.7-release stuff.  If there
are several places around the net these packages are available
that might be sufficient for these sites that tend to lag a bit
behind.

If you want to poke at the site and see what's there it is
accessible at "ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/FreeBSD-Archive",
though if you are coming from a non-EDU site you might need some
patience getting in - we're usually at our limit of 50 for that.
We're almost never at the separate limit of 50 for EDU sites.

If you want to download the site it's the FreeBSD-Archive rsync module
on both ftp.cse.buffalo.edu and ftp-master.us.freebsd.org.  If you
want to use FTP-based tools then it's just ftp.cse.buffalo.edu, I
don't have ftp-master.us.freebsd.org set up to allow FTP right now.
Sorry, no cvsup access (yet?).

-- 
						Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |